[atamyrat]

I recommend Breaking Bad, there's some startup lessons there.

On S03E10, entire episode is Walter and Jesse trying to catching a fly. One small fly inside huge lab. Jesse wants to give up and continue cooking, but for Walter, this is absolutely critical issue. I thought this episode was quite boring, but then Walter explains himself and it finally hit me: It was like assertion code failure, something that should not ever happen under your assumptions. You don't just ignore assertion failures. Code could still work and you can still ship it, but that code is not what you think it is anymore. This small fly in lab is going to ruin your entire product. Drop everything and catch that fly first.

Another interesting thing is, you can understand what it means to "know your metrics". They have pureness metric to scientifically measure their product quality. Pureness is what makes their product best in the market and they never compromise on it. It is interesting that how they keep an eye on it and why it matters.

[swah]

And the funny thing is how much he changes to the later seasons when a dirty place is "perfect".

[michaelochurch]

"Fly" was a brilliant episode, but I didn't take it to be about things that "should never" happen (assertion failure) so much as about Walter's mental decay. The reality is that 100.00% purity is physically impossible to achieve and there are always "contaminants" and people have to balance impurity and risk against the upside of what they're doing (if you're making meth, a fly is not a big deal). In part, I think he was driven by his memory of previous work and a bit of nostalgia. Since he remembers a pristine working environment when he was an esteemed chemist, he's trying to get back to that. In reality, there were imperfections, but he doesn't see them.

In part, it was like Lady MacBeth's "out, damn spot" monologue: a guilty conscience leading to obsessive mysophobia. But it also was the first sign that, even though Walter was at a point where he could just follow orders, coast, and make a lot of money, he wouldn't. Something would piss him off and stop work or worse. His guilty conscience, at first, was about the fly but, later, it was projected onto Jesse, explaining why he took extreme measures (endangering his own life) to protect him.