By Ron Wiener, CEO, Earth Class Mail

I’ve been flying airplanes since 1984, and it is the greatest passion in my life outside of my own family and my addiction to start-up companies. For some pilots, flying is about boring holes in the sky. For others it’s about just getting from Point A to Point B more efficiently. For me, it has always been about associating with ordinary people who have chosen to do an extraordinary thing — getting their pilot’s license, and beginning their never-ending quest to improve their skills and rack up extraordinary experiences.

In this brotherhood of aviation I’ve met Fortune 500 CEOs and musicians, generals and housewives, astronauts and college students — all of whom share a common passion and a common achievement with only one-half of one percent of the rest of the population.

One can find many parallels between the types of people who fly airplanes and the types of people who succeed in entrepreneurship. Aviation, like entrepreneurship, takes people from different walks of life, different educational and work experiences, even different cultures, and puts them all on a level playing field. It has always been amazing to me to watch a high-powered CEO taking lessons from a 20-year-old certified flight instructor (CFI) and bowing to her superior knowledge and experience, cowering at her admonitions and begging for her praise for any maneuver well done.

The correlation to entrepreneurship is quite subtle. I’ve seen veterans of large corporations - with amazing two- or three-decade resumes filled with executive titles and major accomplishments - arrive at a start-up only to fail utterly within weeks or months. Since the skills that allowed them to be highly successful in large bureaucracies are largely non- transferable to start-up culture, the key question is whether they recognize what they don’t know, and can they lower themselves to learn from younger, “less-accomplished” folks who actually have more experience than they do in surviving and thriving in a start-up?

This is but one reason that, all other things being equal, I always hire pilots into my start-ups whenever I can, at all levels of the organization, and especially in the top ranks. Here’s why:

They’re not too proud to ask questions. Whereas a non-pilot may take a superior attitude to others on his or her team who came to the company with less impressive resumes, good pilots know that there is something valuable to be learned — possibly something life-saving — from even the youngest person, low on the totem pole, who has nevertheless been at the entrepreneurship game longer.

It all boils down to whether your ego is stronger than your instinct for self-preservation. As the saying goes, “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.” Same goes for entrepreneurship — you’ll find that a common trait among successful entrepreneurs is their ruthless determination to learn from others’ experiences rather than assume they already possess everything they need to know. Great entrepreneurs spend a lot of time meeting with other entrepreneurs, reading books and attending speeches by other entrepreneurs, and listening to people in their own organization. They surround themselves with good advisors — board members, mentors, and paid professionals — and they take in as much advice as they can before making critical decisions.

They study others’ failures to avoid repeating them. The adage goes that many pilots died in the creation of every item on the pilot’s checklist. We use these checklists to avoid repeating the same mistakes that killed the pioneers. Four out of every five start-ups fail because they run out of capital. The smart entrepreneurs will voraciously study why the pioneers in their field ran out of money — and thus reduce the odds of repeating known mistakes. Ask entrepreneurs whose previous ventures failed and they will often tell you that — hindsight being 20/20 — the failure could have been avoided were it not for “just one thing.”

That one thing may have been an underestimated time to market, or a dispute among co-founders, or a product failure of some sort. The difference between successful entrepreneurs and failed ones can usually be traced to whether they paid attention to available warnings — often from fellow co-workers, investors or board members. Not soliciting and processing such feedback is tantamount to flying without checklists – you are bound to wind up as yet one more negative example for others to learn from.

Guilty as charged. Most successful entrepreneurs fail with their first one or more companies before they strike gold. My first two companies — ironically, aviation companies — in fact didn’t make it. I don’t look back and think, “Gosh, I’ve wasted seven years of my life and all my capital on those ventures.” I look at it as valuable experience gained that increased the odds of success of my next ventures. And indeed that is how things worked out, but if I have to be candid about it I could have listened more to investors (including those who chose not to invest), board members, colleagues and employees who predicted the ultimate cause of death before it hit us.

They exude confidence and authority. Flying airplanes — or even flying in airplanes as a passenger — requires a suspension of disbelief. Unless you have an education in basic physics, an airplane sitting on the ground probably doesn’t look to you as if it should be able to fly. To most people, launching a start-up is as scary a prospect as climbing inside a Curtiss Jenny biplane was to pilots and passengers a century ago. But just as millions of people now nonchalantly board airliners every day, society has also become more respectful and encouraging of people who start their own businesses.

What we want to know about the pilots in the cockpit is the same as what we want to know about CEOs of start-ups — that they’ve had experience at the controls, that they have good training (including good mentors), and that they’€™ve put their own skin in the game. (Would you get on board an airliner if the pilot were flying it by remote control from the safety of the control tower? Probably not!)

They know the importance of clear communication and discipline. One other aspect of being a pilot that pays great dividends in any fast-moving organization, and especially in start-ups, is the discipline of clear, concise, and appropriate communications. A student pilot learns early on that we say “one-two-niner” on the radio because “nine” can be confused with “nein” to a German, and “one twenty nine” can easily be misheard as a compass bearing 100-degrees off and headed straight for granite on a heading of “twenty nine.” Though the FAA says that the person at the controls is the “pilot-in-command” (PIC) of his aircraft, that person has a responsibility to communicate his progress points to air traffic control and other pilots in the air around him, and to request approvals from air traffic control before taking certain actions.

This discipline is very helpful in start-ups. I find that I work best with people who take charge of their own tasks and don’t require me to micromanage or nag them for details because they communicate too little of their progress, or are reticent to call me if they need help or should get approval before taking key steps forward. The efficiency in communications between pilots is not just about limiting airtime by using special lingo; it is about knowing when you should or must communicate, and not to pollute the airwaves with over-communication. Think of airwaves as your email and voicemail inboxes and your time spent on calls and in meetings. At the speed of a startup, communications efficiency is hypercritical.

Unfortunately only one out of 200 people you’ll find in the workplace is likely to be or have been at some time a pilot. I wish there were more of them to hire. But when you look at the ranks of highly accomplished business people, professionals, and especially entrepreneurs, you will find a much higher percentage of pilots among them than in the general work force. In fact, CEOs, doctors and lawyers make up the top three largest segments of the private pilot population.

If you’ve read this far and decided that you want to go earn that pilot’s license you’ve always dreamed of since you were a kid, check out www.beapilot.com. By the way, you’ll find that the VC and angel investor ranks are chock full of pilots — and whether they consciously think about it or not, they‒re probably more likely to back you if you’re a pilot, too. One more incentive to get ‘er done!
For more on why pilots make great start-up execs, check out Ron Wiener’€™s complete blog on this topic on Earth Class Mail‒s blogsite and feel free to share your experiences from the start-up world and your comments on his advice.