Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy

interactive.satellitetoday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 283 posts

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

#181

Post by mlindner »

heavyset_go wrote: post #146
zizee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> My company immediately sues anyone who leave to join a competitor > So do Elon's companies Sorry to be pedantic, but there is a big difference between "sues anyone", and Tesla suing what must be a small percentage of leavers. And your links describe lawsuits not for "leaving and joining a competitor", but for sabotage and trying to walk out with trade secrets, schematics and code.

> And your links describe lawsuits not for "leaving and joining a competitor", but for sabotage and trying to walk out with trade secrets, schematics and code. To be pedantic, those are just claims Tesla made, and the articles even mention other IP-related suits by Elon's companies that were dropped because they were nonsense. Even the first link about a $1 million lawsuit over "stolen trade secrets" was actually the…

> I'm not going to take Tesla at their word when they have an extensive history of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate people.

The lawsuit wasn't bogus, and Tesla went on to win that lawsuit, with a large payout from that former employee to Tesla.

I suggest having a more skeptical eye about what you read on the internet. There's a tremendous amount of very motivated reporters out there wanting to write about anything Musk related and will automatically believe any source that disparages Musk or a Musk company in some way. Your "See also" for example wasn't actually a Tesla whistleblower, and Tesla successfully won their case against such fake whistleblower. https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/tesla-lawsuit-whistleblow...

These reporters have created a false impression about Musk and his companies that's now a sort of shared deception held by many such that they believe Musk companies are bad in some way and will further believe any negative news, causing a self-perpetuating cycle. It's been interesting to watch how it works over the years.

https://www.reuters.com/article/tesla-court-tripp/former-tes...

> A former Tesla Inc factory employee will pay Elon Musk’s electric car maker $400,000 after it accused him of tipping reporters about alleged production inefficiencies and delays, a court filing shows.

...

> According to the court filing, Tripp did not contest Tesla’s claims that he stole trade secrets, and acknowledged that his counterclaims were funded by a short seller of Tesla stock. The filing was signed by Tripp and a Tesla lawyer.

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

#182

Post by notahacker »

philwelch wrote: post #177
uxcolumbo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Theoretically the advantages are light sources focused where the plant needs when they need it resulting in faster growth. Just turns out that for most crops, that (and lower land use) isn't enough to cover the disadvantages of the extra infrastructure needed. Plus you can install lights in a greenhouse...

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

#184

Post by LightBug1 »

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…

Sounds familiar.

I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the ...

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

#185

Post by mlindner »

tru3_power wrote: post #11
elbigbad wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company immediately sues anyone who leave to join a competitor, and even more viciously attacks I would assume if someone were to actually start a competing business.

On what grounds do they sue them?

Many because they stole company secrets, or actually hacked the company's servers and walked out with company documents.

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

#186

Post by SilverBirch »

mlindner wrote: post #178
SilverBirch wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

Here's the reporting on the takeover attempt[1], it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected. Sam has been quite open about what is going on with OpenAI - namely that what they needed to develop the tech was billions of dollars, and the only way they would get that money is a private venture, which they've negotiated with terms that actually limit the upside with profits beyond a certain point returning to the non-profit entity, as well as the issues with dumping potentially dangerous tech straight into the public domain. Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.

[1]:https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...

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

#187

Post by mlindner »

SilverBirch wrote: post #186
mlindner wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fi…

Here's the reporting on the takeover attempt[1], it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected. Sam has been quite open about what is going on with OpenAI - namely that what they needed to develop the tech was billions of dollars, and the only way they would get that money is a private venture, which they've negotiated with terms that actually limit the upside with…

Do you have a source that's not the Verge? I've learned to not trust them for anything Musk related as they have a history of incorrect and biased reporting.

> it also mentions he didn't provide anything like the amount of funding that was initially expected

Elon provided $100M, were they expecting more than that? That's quite a lot of money for an early company.

> Also, OpenAI was never a partnership between just Musk and Altman, there were half a dozen other people involved including Thiel and Reid Hoffman, there is no way that Altman unilaterally pushed Musk out. It looks a lot more like Musk wanted to be in charge, and doesn't like that OpenAI ended up succeeding without him.

It doesn't surprise me that Elon wanted to be in control, given that they started to go against the joint vision established by Sam and Elon from the get go. You mention it was "half a dozen other people", but it was Elon and Sam that were the public leaders for the vision of the company.

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

#188

Post by prox »

catmanjan wrote: post #160
uxcolumbo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We still aren’t fully utilising horizontal farming which is significantly cheaper

My uncle is in that business. Even with organic (so no chemicals) techniques the amount of optimization that can be done is staggering. Companies do keep their knowledge very secret, so you won’t know as an average farmer, it’s definitely not an open source spirit in the farming industry.

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

#189

Post by rapsey »

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.

It has never been and has no path to being economically viable.

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

#190

Post by solatic »

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…

> the original goal should be, primarily, totally disconnected from money. Any monetary benefits should be a side effect of providing value.

Value is a funny word here. You have a business if you create value for both your users/customers and yourself.

You don't have to monetize on day one, but how you create value for yourself needs to be at least a fuzzy part of your vision from inception.

Post reply on HN