amanda southworth

In startup terms, the whiteout is the constant envelopment of mental model gathering and shifting that someone must do to exist and excel in a startup environment. I used to think the hardest part of a startup is gathering the skills, and I now feel that it is managing the whiteout.

Compared to the bureaucratic nightmare that California’s high speed rail initiative has come to, Brightline was meant to show much much more efficient handling something like this over to a private company would be. That was the idea in 2018, when Brightline launched. Today, a person is killed by a Brightline train every 13 days its’ in service.

If we are leveraging AMBER alerts as a way to convince ourselves that in the off-chance a child will be harmed by a stranger, all we have to do is send messages and activate the citizens around us, we are greatly mistaken.

Software that helps people is hard. Perhaps, it is one of the hardest and most gratifying engineering and product development challenges we have to face in our modern world. It is the rarity of achieving that goal that makes it all the more imperative to do so. What a failure it would be to have all of these resource and opportunities, and to not seize the moment to give back to our world that gave us these resources.

ASDE-X is a runway surveillance program designed to prevent collisions and the FAA spent $550 million to install it at 35 of the busiest airports in the U.S. But on March 22, 2026, ASDE-X partially failed to predict a collision that would have prevented a fire truck from crossing the path of an incoming Air Canada CRJ, killing both pilots. Why did ASDE-X fail? Or, did it fail at all?