In the 70s and 80s, the SR-71 Blackbird — an advanced long-range reconnaissance aircraft developed by Lockheed's Skunk Works division under the direction of lead engineer Kelly Johnson — flew at speeds over Mach 3 (2,200 mph/ 3,540 km/h) at altitudes higher than 85,000 feet to reconnoiter and surveil enemy positions in the Soviet Union, Vietnam, North Korea, Middle East, China, Cuba, and anywhere else in the world, as needed. The jet was literally impossible to take down: no fighter aircraft or surface-to-air missile system could catch or intercept it, giving it free reign over hostile territory.

In the SR-71 era, the United States could track the enemy’s every move. This not only afforded us a massive advantage in real-time intelligence and operational flexibility, but was a powerful deterrent — the adversary knew we were watching, thus were discouraged from aggressive actions, and less likely to conduct surprise attacks. For the US, the SR-71 was an asymmetric advantage.

As a founder or startup leader, your goal is — obviously — to win at a game that matters. Not the little battles along the way, but the war that drives impact at massive scale. At my company Hermeus, the game we are playing is an ambitious endeavor to do what even the great Kelly Johnson couldn’t: deliver autonomous Mach 5 airplanes to the Department of Defense and eventually Mach 5 commercial passenger aircraft to shrink the world. The challenges we’ve faced building the company over the past five years have formed how I think about strategy more than any experience in my life. The core kernel of our plan to win has become as clear as day to me: asymmetry.

Asymmetry is an outsized, unmatched, decisive advantage in the context of a specific game. In defense and national security, asymmetry allows a country to deter conflict, and, when it must fight, win quickly. In tech and business, asymmetry allows insurgent startups to leverage their natural advantages to disrupt incumbents, create revolutionary products, and build massively valuable companies along the way, even when the odds are massively stacked against them.

Asymmetry is such a simple, obvious idea. But delivering it is another story, because it’s not the natural state of the world — nature abhors a vacuum. Developing asymmetry means augmenting your strengths, exploiting your competition’s weaknesses, and focusing on high-leverage knobs. Maintaining it requires an immense effort to continuously advance your capabilities, especially when you’re miles ahead of your competition. All this is difficult, but not impossible, and while there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for creating asymmetries, there are useful principles and tactics that can be applied. Here are mine.

Understand the physics of the system, then hack it

Strategy is two things: understanding the game you’re playing, and having an approach to winning it. But you can’t win the game without total clarity on what the game is — what the rules are, which ones matter, and which are actually just guidelines (thus breakable). In other words, you have to understand the physics of the system so you can hack it to deliver asymmetries and win.

Incumbent players have been around the system for so long they don’t understand how it works anymore, and more importantly, why it works the way it does. Because they’ve already established their position in the market, there’s too much risk and not enough near-term upside to justify digging in and hacking the system to maintain their advantage. Often, creating new asymmetries makes tried and true advantages already at scale obsolete — the classic Innovator’s Dilemma. This results in atrophy of their first principles reasoning muscle.

Paul Graham summed this up well in a 2010 essay, which coincidentally includes an anecdote about Sam Altman:

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They’re not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That’s why I’d use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter…

Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they’d hacked something to their advantage — hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications.

When we applied to YC in 2018, my answer to Sam’s question was about how I turned a 20-page proposal for a $150,000 DoD small business contract into a multi-million dollar development program for a hypersonic air-launched liquid rocket, while keeping all the IP. I learned how the DoD decided to spend money, how Congress appropriated it, and which specific people needed to champion our product to get the deal done. The hack was leveraging that understanding to shape the customer behind the scenes — play the “inside baseball” of the Department of Defense — to secure funding from inside the government and dedicate it to our own program. We didn’t get in to YC, so maybe we didn’t clear Sam’s bar back then, but we certainly did a few years later when he led Hermeus’ $100 million Series B round in 2022.

When you’re figuring out the rules of the game, you’re in a solution space that incumbents rarely even think about anymore. They’ve lost the intellectual curiosity to understand why the system works the way it does as well as the audacity and incentive to take a fundamentally different approach. This is an asymmetry.

Counter asymmetries in your raise

A key part of every founder’s journey is fundraising. Over the course of a fundraise, you may end up doing a hundred pitches or more. But every VC you pitch hears that many in a month, and a lot of them have been in the business for a decade or more. So while you’re pitching a lineup of VCs — likely fumbling around and making mistakes in the process — and only gaining a relative small amount of information with each interaction, the VCs on the other side of the table are effectively seeing all the deals in your sector, getting much more information than you on pricing, and know what everyone in the space (and most importantly, your competition) is up to.

You’re up against two asymmetries in fundraising. The first is an experience asymmetry, but you can counter it. For example, in our first raise, we categorized potential investors by desirability, and separated our meetings out into tranches. Our first tranche was all good VCs, but the least likely to fund our specific idea. By sequencing the process this way, we got reps on our pitch while minimizing the damage of the mistakes and gaffes we knew we’d make as we refined it and got better at selling it. By the time we got to our most desirable potential investors, we were not just much better at presenting and pitching, but were thinking about our business, what our investors cared about, and how to communicate with them much better.

During your raise, you’re also battling an information asymmetry. But there are information asymmetries inherent in your position that you can exploit. Running our first process, we had several tactics for doing this. First, we knew everyone talks to each other in Silicon Valley — we called it the “red phone network.” This means that when you’re pitching one VC, you’re basically pitching ten, and that represents an advantage to the investors. Our way of dealing with that was to get people into the deal who were outside the red phone network. These were groups from corporate venture, east coast capital, family offices, etc. They allowed us to create an information asymmetry where more investors were wondering “am I going to miss this deal?” effectively generating FOMO — that’s a characteristic of a well-executed fundraise.

You can also use the red phone network strategically. Excitement and enthusiasm for your round are good, but only create the outcome you're driving toward in certain conditions, specifically density. For example, if you get 10 firms excited about your company at separate times, that’s not particularly useful. Instead, you need to sequence your pitches and communications such that those 10 firms are excited at the same time. This way, you’re creating demand for your company that is well in excess of supply — a simple, yet powerful asymmetry.

Raising money is challenging, but remember that you have a number of levers you can pull to create advantageous asymmetries — use them.

The incumbent’s sclerotic business model is your startup’s asymmetry

When we started Hermeus, my three co-founders and I were first-time founders without significant amounts of our own capital. Most people would say you need a billionaire to build an aerospace technology company pushing the boundaries of speed in aviation. Elon Musk started SpaceX with about $100 million of his own money, about $175 million in today’s dollars. I think we started Hermeus with a whopping $12,000 across the four of us — without the luxury of a lot of money, we had to do it the hard way. The challenges to raising were immense — it required a cycle of securing funding, building hardware, demoing the tech, signing contracts, then rinsing and repeating, but at an ever larger scale, with ever higher stakes.

One thing we knew from the start of our fundraising process was that Hermeus’ model needed to avoid developing products weighed down by the bad asymmetries characteristic of established aerospace and defense primes. We had to de-risk the technology and demonstrate high-speed airplane capabilities that hadn’t been done before quickly and capital efficiently, not over decades spending billions of taxpayer dollars. In doing so, we also had to create products that solved important challenges for our customers.

Our approach was to build an organization capable of rapid iteration at the system level to get the data necessary to attack the next level of complexity. Build a high-speed engine, then build an airplane, then build a supersonic airplane, then break the SR-71 speed record, etc., at the rate of one major de-risk per year. No one had attempted this rate of hardware-rich iteration in airplanes since the heyday of Kelly Johnson and the Skunk Works, mostly because it defies the incentive structure of the defense establishment — having the government pay for R&D on contracts that fully reimbursed costs, thus taking no risk. We had our asymmetry, now we had to deliver.

In a meeting with Khosla Ventures, who ended up leading our seed round, they asked “What could you do with $2 million?” Our response: “We can build a hypersonic engine.” Even though we had never done this before, that gamble was our best option for demonstrating our approach to solving de-risking high-speed flight quickly and with capital efficiency. Nine months later, and $1.5 million spent, we had a working engine that could operate up to Mach 4+ at over 70,000 feet.

Until you have a working business model, the default state of your startup is dead. Don’t make the challenge even more difficult by falling into the easy trap of asymmetries that will do nothing more than set you up to play the wrong game.

The founder’s asymmetry — roll a hard six

Despite the emergence defense tech is currently enjoying, incumbent primes like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman still take home the lion’s share of defense contracts. They have no shortage of asymmetries playing to their advantage: they employ more lobbyists than anyone else, customers see them as less risky after decades of delivery, and they have a much deeper and sustained level of access to the inner-workings of the opaque DoD environment.

These advantages are formidable and we take them seriously. But as an aerospace technology startup whose mission it is to radically accelerate both defense and commercial aviation, we have a number of levers that primes don’t. We have much faster development timelines, are far more capital efficient, and can operate our customer engagements at much higher clock speeds. However, our most important asymmetry of all is that if we don’t bring our products to market, we die. Though this last fact can be immensely stressful, it’s also an advantage. It’s the founder’s asymmetry.

A good example of the founder’s asymmetry is SpaceX vs. Blue Origin. Both companies are about 20 years old, but one delivers more payload to orbit than the entire rest of the world combined, while the other hasn’t even attempted orbital launch yet. This is because of the founder’s asymmetry that Elon Musk has leveraged far better than Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin has never really had its back up against the wall, where if it didn’t successfully complete a milestone, like launch a rocket by a certain date, the company would die. Some might call that good financial management, but the reality is that the psychological state of win or go home is a crucial determinant of success.

As everyone knows, SpaceX has had that from the very beginning. Their fourth Falcon 1 launch, for example, was pulled off under extreme duress: the first three had failed, Elon had already invested a significant amount of his personal money in the company, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy. If that fourth rocket had failed to launch, it was over for SpaceX. Fortunately it succeeded, and the rest is obviously history, but even though the company is beyond the point where this back-against-the-wall reality is its natural state, it still operates as if that’s true, and it's a huge strategic asymmetry that has clearly delivered an enormous advantage.

As an entrepreneur with a company whose default state is dead until profitability and scale, you have this same natural advantage over incumbents: a “nothing to lose” mindset that gives you the willingness to risk everything — to roll a hard six — the flexibility to start over from scratch, and a mandate from heaven that aligns people to your cause. These traits shape a supernatural asymmetry and will help you disrupt your sector’s incumbents. Lean into them.

Once you have the advantage, go even faster

In the 70s and 80s, the SR-71’s missions were carefully planned to exploit its speed and altitude advantages, such that by the time an enemy detected the aircraft, it was often too late to mount an effective response. In other words, the jet could gather intelligence and exit hostile airspace before adversaries could even react. Even if they were able to react in time, the jet’s unique design minimized radar cross-section, making it harder to detect and target, and its sophisticated electronic countermeasures (ECM) could jam enemy radar and communications, further complicating efforts to track and engage the aircraft. Though its speed was a clear advantage, it wasn’t enough for the SR-71 to simply go fast. Instead, its engineers created an asymmetry by making it not only the fastest jet, but the highest flying, with the most advanced instruments, innovative materials, and opportunistic mission planning that exploited these advantages. This is what made the SR-71 unstoppable for over two decades.

This asymmetric approach has been employed by the DoD many times since WWII. The Department refers to it as “Offset Strategies.” The First Offset came in the 1950s — nuclear weapons — and lasted through the 1970s when it was countered through nuclear proliferation. The US quickly transitioned to the Second Offset — intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance paired with precision-guided munitions and stealth capabilities — only to see that asymmetry wane again as those technologies proliferated and became less expensive while counters to them advanced. We’re in the midst of the Third Offset today: software and autonomy, moving toward artificial intelligence. This time, guess who picked up our homework and realized “This asymmetry strategy works, we should use it”: China. Although we prevailed in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, we spent our peace dividend fighting the Global War on Terror for much of the past 20 years. This leaves us in a precarious place as the world’s most advanced military on the verge of losing its edge. This is a major driver for Hermeus — to help deliver the next offset and maintain the proliferation of Western values we all enjoy.

Likewise, as a founder, it isn’t sufficient to develop an advantage over your competition. Remember, asymmetry is not a natural state of the world. When you create an asymmetry, others will immediately work to counter it, eventually rendering it moot. The only thing that actually matters in sustaining asymmetry is your rate of innovation and ability to scale it. Over and over and over again. In other words, winning means getting ahead of your competition, then accelerating so they can never catch up. Only when your steady-state is relentlessly creating new asymmetries, even when you’re miles ahead of the competition, are you truly in the victory condition, because it’s from this position that you can sustainably deliver results better than anyone else on Earth, and do so over the long term. That’s how you make your mark beyond the scope of what the greatest before you have done. That’s how you make a growing, wildly positive impact on the world.

— AJ Piplica