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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

#171

Post by Yoric »

sidibe wrote: post #46
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…

If you're only really interested in the problems you're working on it's tough to go from somewhere everything else is taken care of for you except your problem. No worries about infra or business. What you get is the more academic ones staying and more entrepreneurial leaving

And to clarify, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being academic-minded. Based on my experience, most of the invention (not "innovation", which is the step after that) comes from people who are academic-minded.

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

#172

Post by moffkalast »

hikawaii wrote: post #132
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades. If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.

Or maybe SpaceX did that despite being held back by those people. NASA's management is rather infamous too so it's not like they're competing against much there. Every time NASA's managers gained too much influence over the engineers people actually died.

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

#173

Post by KptMarchewa »

HopenHeyHi wrote: post #161
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

"anti-Elon companies"

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

#174

Post by pavlov »

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…

> “Why everyone isn't leaving Adobe, Meta, and Google to found their own AI / generative media startups astounds me.”

A nice thing about all the status seekers chasing the latest shiny hype object is that it leaves more room for the rest to build boring startups.

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

#175

Post by ben_w »

Mistletoe wrote: post #149
eldenring wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to blame interest rates for all the wealth in tech when you look at all the new products and innovations that have happened over the last 10 years.

Can you list some? I see the last ten years as a great failure in tech following the decade of real innovation and paradigm change that came before it.

GPT-1…4, Falcon 9 reusability (+ Starlink being possible), most modern VR headsets (Oculus public demo was just over ten years ago), 3D printing is a lot better on many axes, commercially viable consumer OLED, displacement of CFL with LED, vegan "cheese" alternatives suck much less than a decade ago, DNA tests so cheap multiple different companies spam advertising for them at me, vat-grown meat is slowly transitioning from sci-fi to panicking Italian farmers into calling for bans, electric cars have gone from expensive Tesla Roadsters to the ~ 20-fold cheaper Wuling Hongguang Mini EV, about 90% of all PV happened in the last decade (and following a roughly exponential growth rate).

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

#176

Post by dalbasal »

hikawaii wrote: post #132
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Then that means that office politics optimizers were able to make Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA look like jokers at something they'd been doing for decades. If I thought this about SpaceX management and ex employees was representative of the culture as a whole,I would throw out all the modern books on managing tech organizations and go all Taylor immediately.

In a sense, this is the organisational fallacy, of our time.

The baby version of this was 15 years ago, when Jobs was Musk and being an asshole was the main/only feature visionary executives emulated.

Maybe the lesson is that we're bad at lessons.

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

#177

Post by philwelch »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #154
SCUSKU wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal anecdote is that I had an ex-SpaceX engineer as a VP of Engineering for a startup I worked for. And he was great. He is a nice guy, super friendly, very knowledgeable, solid manager, always bringing people into the fold, and technically very talented. The company he was the VP of Engineering for was an indoor vertical farming startup (which is failing), and he moved onto a new venture in the climate space…

Why is it failing? Poor management or not viable? Vertical farming seems key for our future.

> Vertical farming seems key for our future.

This has never made sense to me. Vertical farming is just greenhouses except with artificial light instead of natural sunlight. Presumably the renewable source of energy for that artificial light would be solar panels. So why not just build normal greenhouses?

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

#178

Post by mlindner »

SilverBirch wrote: post #155
nebula8804 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've learned to be super careful about what senior people say about other senior people. Because it actually reflects well on you to say nice things about already respected people, it's a free PR boost. It makes them sound generous and also knowledgeable. But, I've seen this happen a lot in big companies, someone will say "Well X is a fantastic engineer" or "X does great work" and my first thought is "Well that's int…

> This is especially true when talking about public figures - Sam Altman in his recent interviews has been incredibly diplomatic about Elon, despite the fact that it's pretty public knowledge Elon tried to take over OpenAI and now loudly disparages it.

OpenAI was co-founded by Altman and Musk together at the same time, with a huge amount of Musk's money, without which it would've never gotten off the ground in the first place. Also please give a citation for this "public knowledge". I'd counter that it's instead pretty public knowledge that OpenAI basically stole Elon's money on a promise of making an AI company that wouldn't lock things behind proprietary walls, but now has turned out to be the complete opposite. Sam Altman pulled a fast one on Musk and then pushed him out of the company.

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

#179

Post by ricksunny »

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…

Selection bias on who decided to leave / got removed from the organization vs who opted to / could stay inside it?

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

#180

Post by hungryforcodes »

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…

And yet their rockets really work!
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