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SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

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Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#101

Post by alienthrowaway »

pptr wrote: post #59
echelon wrote: post #3

I wish it was more like this at existing companies. Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me. If you work in our incredibly lucrative field, you may be able to afford a few quarters of leaning into risk. Startups are like a brush fire. Old incumbents have so much legacy code and cruft that nimble upstarts killing them is healthy . The "SpaceX dia…

Googler here. If you work at a big tech company you can improve the products used by millions if not billions of people. I find that very rewarding.

There's nothing quite like shipping (or breaking!) something that impacts billions (with a 'b') of people . It was unexpectedly exhilarating for me the first time I shipped.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#102

Post by haxton »

moneywoes wrote: post #94
haxton wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually just quit my job at Meta to do just that. So you're not far off, I think you'll be surprised at how many ex-FAANG startups you'll see in the comings months. At least in our blind chat it seems there are several other like-minded people.

Did you have sales or a mvp before quitting

Nope. I have a fair bit of buffer / savings, and felt like this was an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up, so committed to it.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#103

Post by arcticfox »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #71
echelon wrote: post #3

I wish it was more like this at existing companies. Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me. If you work in our incredibly lucrative field, you may be able to afford a few quarters of leaning into risk. Startups are like a brush fire. Old incumbents have so much legacy code and cruft that nimble upstarts killing them is healthy . The "SpaceX dia…

Ex-Netflixer here. I've come to appreciate that equity for your time !== equity for your money. Take cash in excess of your burn rate in-hand over equity any day. Then take that excess cash and buy equity. Compared to taking a $250k base and $250k equity offer from a startup, it's substantially better to take a $500k cash in-hand offer from FAANG and use your extra $250k to cut angel checks. Some early-stage startups…

That makes sense if you're optimizing for money. I think a lot of us that do startups actually enjoy the process as well. My years at FAANG were the years I felt the least proud of myself.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#105

Post by makeitdouble »

sangnoir wrote: post #99
makeitdouble wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incumbents like Adobe , Meta or Google were allowed to reach their size by letting them kill or buy the competition every time something else was rising. As long as regulators won't do anything about that, the next startup challenging an incumbent is just poised to be bought("congratulation on your exit!") and killed. Figma is the latest example of this.

The 7-to-10-digit exits by incumbents is what funds the entire[1] startup industry: compare number of startup acquisitions vs IPOs in the last 10 years. If the FTC clamps down on acquisitions, there's going to be correction in valuations, and some statups will get killed by VCs who view modest successes as not worth their time. 1. Only being slightly hyperbolic

I share your view on this, but also think the main reasons startup take the exits are the VCs. A founder of a VC backed startup will need extraordinary arguments to not sell to an incumbent for a high enough price.

So the whole startup game becomes a petri dish for incumbents to see the natural selection of ideas and pick up the viable ones without paying for the failed experiments, and the VCs footing the bill as long as their balance sheet works out in the end.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#106

Post by yawnr »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #96

Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…

VCs and other startups love to shower these people with money like they’re the second coming only to find out that their success was purely circumstantial and mostly a confluence of a ton of factors that had nothing to do with them like luck and timing.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#107

Post by throwawaysleep »

echelon wrote: post #3

I wish it was more like this at existing companies. Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me. If you work in our incredibly lucrative field, you may be able to afford a few quarters of leaning into risk. Startups are like a brush fire. Old incumbents have so much legacy code and cruft that nimble upstarts killing them is healthy . The "SpaceX dia…

I like my 15 hour workweek anywhere in the world with few stakes and little risk.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#108

Post by PragmaticPulp »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #96

Anecdotal, but: Startup I worked at hired a bunch of SpaceX and other musk company employees as middle management, during the hyper growth phase and every single one of them was simply awful. Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game…

> Some were just abusive managers, many were just not that effective. The worst one was a manager that would swoop down with heroics, take credit for other people's work, not support reports on ideas you had, played the blame game, etc.

Also anecdotal, but this is identical to my experience with a handful of ex-employees of some Elon companies. They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else.

One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us.

They were weirdly, unnecessarily ruthless in everything they did behind your back. But they were also highly polished and charismatic when addressing you directly.

Obviously this isn’t unique, but it was weird to see how consistent it was from this group of people.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#109

Post by kajecounterhack »

chatmasta wrote: post #89
r3trohack3r wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex-Netflixer here. I've come to appreciate that equity for your time !== equity for your money. Take cash in excess of your burn rate in-hand over equity any day. Then take that excess cash and buy equity. Compared to taking a $250k base and $250k equity offer from a startup, it's substantially better to take a $500k cash in-hand offer from FAANG and use your extra $250k to cut angel checks. Some early-stage startups…

As a startup founder who doesn't pay himself much, IMO people either care about money or they don't. Depends what you're optimizing for. But if you're obsessed with cash you shouldn't start a company IMO. You're better off working for "FAANG" or whatever the cash obsessed optimizers are calling it these days. I mean obviously if you start a company you want to optimize for it making profit, but the original goal shou…

To be fair, not everyone who optimizes for cash is "obsessed with cash" or a "cash obsessed optimizer" -- life circumstances like dependent family, the oppression of college debt, etc make stability of a large corporation attractive to some, even if they would take on risk given other circumstances.

Example: taking 80k/yr out of college while having to retire 2k/month of college debt, then using the rest to afford bay area rent + commuting expenses + rest of life would have been hard and arguably not a good use of a young person's early career phase. They might opt instead to work at a bigco until their debt was sufficiently retired, then with the safety net of {an established career + no debt + some money in the bank} swinging for the fences at a startup later. You're more likely to get leadership roles at startups when you have a few years under your belt anyway.

Re: SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

#110

Post by PragmaticPulp »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #71
echelon wrote: post #3

I wish it was more like this at existing companies. Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me. If you work in our incredibly lucrative field, you may be able to afford a few quarters of leaning into risk. Startups are like a brush fire. Old incumbents have so much legacy code and cruft that nimble upstarts killing them is healthy . The "SpaceX dia…

Ex-Netflixer here. I've come to appreciate that equity for your time !== equity for your money. Take cash in excess of your burn rate in-hand over equity any day. Then take that excess cash and buy equity. Compared to taking a $250k base and $250k equity offer from a startup, it's substantially better to take a $500k cash in-hand offer from FAANG and use your extra $250k to cut angel checks. Some early-stage startups…

> Some early-stage startups that try to court you will instead take a $10k check on the spot as an early investment.

How often are you seeing these deals?

In my experience, any company raising in increments of $10K is really only doing so as a way to get people invested (literally) so they can continue to hit them up for funding, connections, and networking later on. $10K doesn’t really go very far in terms of paying employees.

Of course that’s fine if it works out that way, but I’ve also seen companies who gather $10K from every random person who can invest end up with some wacky cap tables, which becomes a turnoff to future investors. This creates weird situations where they put a lot of pressure on buying people out of their investments just to clean up the cap table. Again, could be fine for a quick turnaround but it’s not quite the same as investing for the long term.

And then there’s the fact that most angel investments are just going to go to zero, but that’s the nature of the game.

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