Escape Velocity, Literary

In the startup world, product manager often talk about needing to escape velocity. What they actually mean is their company needing to achieve a certain scale and growth rate to be meaningful. However, the term escape velocity actually has a whole set of different meaning.

The official definition of escape velocity is the minimum speed required for an object to completely get away from any planet's gravitational force. The mathematical formula is listed below:

	=	escape velocity
	=	universal gravitational constant
	=	mass of the body to be escaped from
	=	distance from the center of the mass

As we can see in the equation above, the speed required depends largely on the mass of a planet. To put it in perspective, the Ve of Earth is 11.19 km/s while the Ve of the Sun is 618. km/sec as its mass is much greater.