What Top Gun Taught Me About Being a Founder

No 106 | I thought it was about me.

"I feel the need... the need for speed." — Maverick and Goose, Top Gun (1986)

Tomorrow night I’m seeing Top Gun on the big screen for the first time since I was twelve. May 13, 2026. Forty years almost to the day. Paramount is running it for one week only, both films back to back, in IMAX. The first theatrical release since Val Kilmer died, which means every Iceman scene hits different.

I’ve seen the movie maybe forty times. For most of those viewings I thought it was about me. I was Maverick. Every founder who loves this movie thinks the same. That’s the whole con.

I have also been Maverick for Halloween more times than I can count. Bomber jacket, aviators, white t-shirt, the whole bit. One Halloween on Washington Street in San Francisco, a stranger looked me over and said, you look like Tom Cruise ate Tom Cruise. This was a different version of me. Heavier. Pre the work of taking care of myself. The line was accurate. He wasn’t roasting a stranger. He was describing the gap. That’s the whole essay, actually. The Maverick in your head and the Maverick in the mirror are not the same guy.

You watch it at sixteen and you want to be him. At twenty-five you think you are him. You start a company and behave like him, and for a while it works, because the instinct that bends physics is real and the willingness to break the rule the second it stops serving the mission is why anything new ever gets built. Then one day you watch the movie again and realize Maverick is wrong for most of it. Wrong about Goose. Wrong about the inverted dive. Wrong about what he’s competing for. I missed that for a long time.

The Maverick years are the best years and the most expensive. You fly inverted four feet off another man’s canopy because you can. You buzz the tower because the tower is asking for it. And somewhere in the noise, you stop hearing what you’re costing the people around you.

Then you stop flying. I sold the company and started writing checks. The cockpit goes away. You’re on the deck now. The deck is enormous, and you never really saw it before. You see founders the way Viper saw you, with affection and worry in equal measure. He’d already flown the mission. He knew what the next twenty years would cost you, and knew there was no way to tell you that would land.

Iceman was telling me the truth the whole time. I don’t like you because you’re dangerous. I sided with Maverick. Of course I did. Watch it again at fifty. Iceman isn’t jealous. He’s running risk management on a teammate endangering the squadron. He’s the co-founder telling you the truth no one else will, and you can’t hear him because the story is about you.

The older I get, the more I notice the carrier deck. Not the pilots. The choreography underneath them. The mechanics. The fuel crews. The people guiding million-dollar machines through darkness with hand signals and discipline. A jet hitting the wire at night works because forty people made forty quiet decisions in the right order. Maverick gets the credit. The deck does the work. The company is the deck.

Goose is the part that still breaks me. He sings the harmony in the bar, holds the family together, translates the recklessness into something human. Talk to me, Goose. When founders lose their Goose, you see it in the eyes. The instinct stays, the joy leaves. The job becomes performance. The scene where Maverick treads water holding Goose’s body is one of the truest scenes about leadership Hollywood has ever filmed. Sometimes you do everything right and someone you love still doesn’t make it. What you do with that weight is the job.

In the third act, Maverick is back in the air. He hesitates. He breaks off. Then he reengages, and the line he gives Merlin is the line every founder needs taped to the monitor. I’m engaging. Not thinking about it. Not waiting for clarity. Engaging. Conviction is a verb.

And then the moment that makes the whole movie. Iceman, who has spent ninety minutes telling Maverick he’s dangerous, looks across the deck and says, You can be my wingman anytime. Coming from Iceman, that line is a benediction. Maverick knows exactly what just got handed to him. And then, because he’s still Maverick, he grins and fires back, No, you can be mine. The swagger is still there. It just isn’t a weapon anymore. The instinct didn’t go away. It got disciplined.

Tomorrow night I’ll sit in a dark room and watch it again. The lights will go down. Danger Zone will hit. The deck crew will start moving. And for a few seconds, before I remember anything else, I’ll be twelve.

Then Goose will go down. And I’ll know what that loss costs a person for the rest of their career.

Iceman will walk into the locker room. This time I’ll see him. Not the rival. The wingman who was right.

Val Kilmer will fly again, a year after we lost him. The screen will hold him longer than it needs to.

The dead get one more sortie.

Somewhere a few rows back, a twelve-year-old kid will decide he wants to be Maverick. He won’t know yet that the movie isn’t about Maverick. He’ll have to fly the mission to find that out.

I want to turn around and tell him. I won’t. He wouldn’t hear me anyway.

Nobody hears Iceman the first time.