SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by kajecounterhack » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:21 AM UTC

makeitdouble wrote: post #66

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…

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.

Figma's not a great example of "buying to kill" though -- I'd guess that Adobe would sooner deprioritize their existing products that compete with Figma and redirect their effort. And I don't see much wrong with FB buying Instagram or Adobe buying Figma or Google buying YouTube because these services actually got better to the consumer's benefit (and I guess to a limited extent the enriched early employees perpetuate the startup ecosystem).

In the case of Google & YouTube, I wonder if YouTube would even be able to turn a profit as an independent company (maybe today they could, but for most of their life I suspect they were unable generate any profit). I love having YouTube and would have been sad if they had to close their doors because nobody had deep enough pockets to nurture it into profitability.

Cruise & GM is another example of a potentially good purchase, since self-driving tech is going to require a lot of patience.

To be clear, I don't think monopolies are healthy in general since they perturb natural supply/demand signals, but there's certainly nuance in terms of how some of these deals benefit/hurt the general public based on whether the monopolist entities have vision and appetite for long term investment that would otherwise be tough to swallow.

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

#112

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:28 AM UTC

kajecounterhack wrote: post #109

chatmasta wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ba…

Oh, totally agree - what you optimize for is a personal preference. I don't have a wife nor kids and that significantly affects the constraints of what I'm willing to do. And I've got nothing against anyone who chooses to work for FAANG, this is just my personal outlook: if you're concerned about money, you should take it from the people willing to pay you for your work. But if you've got an investor willing to pay you to develop something, then you better not be thinking about your own personal "total comp," because you've got (a) employees who need to be paid and (b) investors who want to see your company amount to something. As someone who's never had "a real job," I can promise you - my friend at FAANG contemplating quitting to pursue their own ideas - the grass is always greener on the other side.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:34 AM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108

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 themse…

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by mkolodny » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:40 AM UTC

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…

I'm the founder of a 1 person company. If the company ever grows to 2+ people, I hope to give my teammates the freedom I wish I had as an employee.

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

#115

Post by givemeethekeys » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:44 AM UTC

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…

You should pay your employees their market rate. Your risk of going out of business is higher is what warrants the bigger equity.

You spend all this time and salary to build a team that works like a well-oiled machine. It would be a shame to lose them to someone who simply pays the market rate.

Your team is likely going to be working more than overtime helping you build your dream. You should match what FAANG's paying them, if thats your competition for talent.

As they say, you get what you pay for.

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

#116

Post by chatmasta » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 4:58 AM UTC

givemeethekeys wrote: post #115

chatmasta wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should pay your employees their market rate. Your risk of going out of business is higher is what warrants the bigger equity. You spend all this time and salary to build a team that works like a well-oiled machine. It would be a shame to lose them to someone who simply pays the market rate. Your team is likely going to be working more than overtime helping you build your dream. You should match what FAANG's payin…

Yeah, I definitely agree. I'd rather pay a premium to get the best employee and take a discount myself, rather than pay someone below market while paying myself some absurd salary. Frankly I don't care what I pay myself as long as I can afford an apartment and groceries, and so far this has worked out well, as I love the employees we have. If I were exfiltrating a bunch of money for my own salary we would have been out of business months ago.

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

#117

Post by nebula8804 » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 5:05 AM UTC

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…

Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies.

And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same time we see mediocre build quality. I just don't understand how such organizations can be both filled with terrible people and rock stars at the same time and survive for as long as the Elon companies have done so.

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

#118

Post by BeefWellington » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 5:17 AM UTC

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…

> Startups are like a brush fire. Old incumbents have so much legacy code and cruft that nimble upstarts killing them is healthy.

Ah yes, "more recent technical debt is newer, therefore better" is the way of today!

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

#119

Post by jjulius » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 5:22 AM UTC

nebula8804 wrote: post #117

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…

Man These Elon companies are really the biggest split personality companies I have seen. I have heard stories like what you describe from some people but then you have people like Astronaut Garrett Reisman, Chip Designer Jim Keller, and AI Research Andrej Karpathy all give amazing praise to Elon and his companies. And when the cars are torn down we see top tier engineering execution and innovation while at the same t…

Hot take: The people you mentioned are hired to bring big-name cred to the organization. None of them stuck around (correct me if I'm wrong, I've only done a cursory glance just now), they all left. Eg, they're the "top tier engineering" part of the companies, and other employees (and I've dealt with these employees at Tesla in a past life, so I can attest to their terrible attitude) are the "mediocre build quality".

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

#120

Post by fhe » Sun, Apr 02, 2023, 5:22 AM UTC

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…

selection bias? in that the people who were let go from or decided to leave SpaceX were the worse performing ones to begin with?