Prolific Prototyping and the Magic of Play
How Stellar Pizza embodies the prototyping mindset through an ethos of embracing failure, building in public, and the magic of play
This last week I was out on the west side of Los Angeles and had the chance to stop by and visit with Benson Tsai, the CEO of Stellar Pizza. Benson is a Harvey Mudd alum (class of ‘06) who I got to know last fall when I connected with him and learned more about his story. After a somewhat winding journey post-Mudd which includes a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, co-founding an electric vehicle company, and most recently working at SpaceX on battery technology, Benson launched Stellar Pizza with two co-founders in 2019.
Spending time with Benson is always a treat and I loved getting to see around their facilities in Hawthorne. I mean, robots and pizza? How could I help myself. If you’re curious, see the process for yourself.
Stellar Prototyping
While I geeked out over all the cool technical stuff that the crew over at Stellar Pizza is doing, what I admire most about Benson and his team is the way they embody the prototyping mindset. As I’ve been chewing on it this past week, I’ve landed on three mottos that the team at Stellar Pizza lives out that we can learn from.
Embrace failure to learn and improve rapidly
Test like you fly: building in public is best
Play is magical
The beauty of these lessons is how broadly they apply. One of things I’ve been noticing more and more over the last few months is the way that the fundamental aspects of the prototyping mindset translate across all kinds of different fields and applications: from engineering to spiritual development, writing to baking, and sports to art and design.
This week, I hope that by seeing the way that Benson and his team leverage these concepts you might also find ways to grow by incorporating them into your practices.
1. Embrace failure to learn and improve rapidly
The fear of failure, more than perhaps anything else, can hold us back. It’s easy to listen to that critical voice in the back of our minds wondering if our idea is any good or will go anywhere. And perhaps even more signficantly, we worry about how trying and failing will make us look to other people.
If we capitulate to our fear of failure then we don’t try. And if we don’t try, then we can’t learn. I often visualize the fear of failure as an obstacle which prevents the smooth flow of the design cycle, putting the brakes on the process somewhere in the midst of the prototyping or testing phase.
Instead of fearing failure, embrace it. Of course, there are some ways that failing can be truly unhelpful. If you fail in such a way that you are unable try again (maybe your company goes belly up) or don’t learn anything from it (perhaps a poorly planned experiment), then that failure might not have redeeming qualities. But with a sprinkle of intentionality and an appropriately designed test, failure is nothing more than an opportunity to get feedback to inform the next iteration of the design process.
I’m sure the folks at Stellar Pizza could tell you about a million and a half failures. Pies that got burnt, or stuck, or got mushrooms instead of peppers. Sensors that went wonky or operator errors that caused an otherwise on-track process to backfire (perhaps with literal fire). But the alternative choice was to disconnect and spend more time on the whiteboard in a less realistic environment.
On my way back from Stellar HQ in Hawthorne I stopped at USC to see the truck in action. It was a Wednesday and the team was out making pies on the streets of Los Angeles. While I was there, stuff went wrong. A pie failed about 10 seconds before it would have finished up. A pie that was supposed to come out with green peppers on top had mushrooms instead (quickly fixed on the fly by toggling a configuration setting on the iPad which runs the whole show—pretty snazzy). The wind ripped one of the signs off a sandwich board and sent it hurdling down the sidewalk.
The team took it all in stride. You could tell it’s just business as usual and part of their DNA. Failure happens one way or another. The question is whether you are going to grab the bull by the horns and create opportunities for the failure to occur in the way that you want it to or, afraid of what might break, let the potential potholes lurk in darkness until you hit them at full speed later down the line.
2. Test like you fly: building in public is best
One of my favorite lines I learned from Benson is “test like you fly.” I’m gonna put this on a sign on above my desk at work. While testing like you fly is connected with the previous point of embracing failure, in my mind it connects with another lesson that I learned from Austin Kleon in his book Show Your Work.
Not only is it important to overcome the fear of failure, but you should consider putting yourself out there in front of your desired audience from the start instead of spending lots of time internally tweaking your design.
From a design thinking standpoint, the rationale for this is pretty clear: unless the thing you’re building is for you alone, then keeping what you’re working on under wraps separates you from valuable feedback you can get from testing your prototype on your actual, intended audience. You likely can simulate the response of your audience in some way or another, but the best way to empathize with your audience is to directly interact with and listen to them.
Stellar Pizza embodies “test like you fly” by getting out there, taking orders, and making pies Wednesday through Sunday. The truck is still a prototype; it’s not finished. There are things that still need to be figured out. When the truck isn’t out on the road, the team back at HQ is making adjustments and testing things out so that they can make modifications before the next week of pizza making.
This strategy gets them in front of actual customers consistently getting real feedback. There’s only so many edge cases they can test in the lab. Murphy’s law is best proven by a customer who will order a pizza in a way you never would have thought about before.
What is something you’re building in private for fear of what somebody else will think or concerns that it isn’t polished enough to share? Try showing your work in progress this week. You might be surprised what you learn.
3. Play is magical
One of the best lessons I’ve learned from my kids is remembering what fun it is to approach the world through the lens of play. Being playful means not taking things so seriously, engaging with creative and crazy ideas, and collaborating with others and riffing off their ideas.
The team at Stellar obviously gets this too. From their mission statement “to spread joy in the world, one pizza at a time, with robots” to the graphics of robots flying pizza slice-shaped pennants and animated stars blinking on their website, the Stellar brand exudes play. I mean, have you ever heard of a company with a Pizza Research Stipend as part of the benefits package?1
And the playful attitude isn’t just a public front; it’s part of the culture from top to bottom. You can feel it in the room as you see engineers tweaking the pepperoni bandsaw (real name) or designing ways to get the temperature just right in the oven to make the perfect pizza with three, individually-controlled heating elements (bottom crust, top crust, and toppings).
Finding ways to play doesn’t subtract from your effectiveness but fuels it. Play doesn’t mean that you aren’t being productive. Instead, it helps to connect us with the kid inside each of us and to maintain joy in what we do.
So what?
Whether you work in a technical field or just are experimenting with a new hobby, the prototyping mindset can help you to make progress on what matters. This week, as you reflect on your work, find ways to embrace failure, test like you fly, and play at work. And if you’re within driving distance of downtown LA, go get some Stellar Pizza!
The Book Nook
I’m excited to announce that Volume 1 of Engineering Through the Lens of Faith is now out and available as a free download. It’s hard to overstate the impact that Bill Graff and Paul Leiffer have had on my life, both personally and professionally. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t think about them during my own work as a professor. I’m excited for this work to be shared more broadly as a public artifact of many years of faithful dedication from these heroes of mine.
Volume 1 covers some foundational aspects of what engineering is and a view of Engineering from a Christian worldview. While the book is written from an explicitly Christian perspective, I would encourage you to check it out even if you are not a person of faith. The questions that Paul and Bill raise in the text are worth considering regardless of your context and background. While you may not come to the same conclusions, my hope is that the questions would help you to think more deeply about engineering and the impact that it has, both on you and those around you.
Here’s a list of the topics included in the first volume so you can get a taste.
VOLUME I: FOUNDATIONS
How do we define engineering? (Ch. 2)
What, actually, is faith? (Ch. 3)
What is the nature of Christian truth and Christian living? (Ch. 4, 5)
What is the place of worldview in our thinking? (Ch. 6)
What is the evidence for Christian truth? (Ch. 7)
How do we approach the idea of work and vocation? (Ch. 8)
How does engineering relate to God? (Ch. 9, 10)
What is the legitimate place of science? (Ch. 11, 12)
What do we make of mathematics? (Ch. 13)
The Professor Is In
I was glad to spend some time in the lab last week to start to build up some new optical systems and begin to put together some shopping lists for some new tools and toys from Thorlabs :). Even 30 minutes working on the optics table reminds me of how much I enjoy building optical systems.
After my conversation with Benson I also booted up a Confluence workspace to start to form some better organizational practices for the lab, riffing on the parallels between launching a startup and running a research lab.
Leisure Line
My fun trip for last week was stopping to see the Stellar Pizza truck near USC. Needless to say, the pizza didn’t make it home (very yummy!). The pepperoni in particular was phenomenal.
Still Life
As a side effect of the rain this last week, I caught this beautiful rainbow on the way home.
No joke. Check their Careers page. Of course a Health & Wellness Stipend is also offered to keep you balanced.