2021 won’t be the year you think it is unless…
“Don’t wish that things were easier. Wish that you were better.” — Jim Rohn
2021 comes with elevated expectations that we can fix everything that was broken about 2020: social divides, global poverty, and inequality, climate change, pandemics to name a few. But what will it take in practice to truly realize the promise of the new year? Collaboration.
Operating at the scale of the challenges we face will take a mix of nonprofit and public involvement and for-profit business models. Think about the end-to-end supply chain for the COVID-19 vaccine for example. Effective governance, active citizen participation, and private sector ingenuity/investment have had to work together to deliver the vaccine effectively and at a record pace. At the time of my writing, the success of the delivery of the new vaccine is still in question here in the U.S.
How do I plan to occupy my time in 2021? Mainly focused on closing the digital divide.
The pandemic revealed the extent to which, the digital divide between the world’s rich and the poor is widening at a time when the pace of digitalization of services and the economy is accelerating. Companies like SpaceX, my new home of employment, are trying to innovate new business models and technological solutions to provide affordable internet anywhere in the world through low-earth-orbit satellite. Most of my time next year will be spent helping SpaceX engineers source material and machine parts to build Starlink satellites on schedule and at optimal costs before launch. The greater the number of satellites SpaceX launches the greater the number of regions around the world that can be covered by Starlink.
Like the effective delivery of the COVID-19 vaccine, SpaceX and other companies in this arena will need to collaborate with governments, and seek active consumer and community participation to achieve our mission of affordable internet for everyone on the planet. My favorite part about working at SpaceX is that I have an opportunity to at least think about the supply chain from end-to-end and understand the interdependencies at play every day.
I wish you a very happy new year. 2021 can be the best year ever but we have got to do a much better job of collaborating at scale to make that vision a reality.
- Austin Thompson
