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

251–260 of 283 posts

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

#251

Post by jasmer »

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 "

Yeah, risk. Disruption is considerably harder than you might imagine, it's not about 'products' it's about market power.

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

#252

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

> 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.

Sounds the type of person that typically gets promoted into those roles.

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

#253

Post by lostdog »

hungryforcodes wrote: post #247
dalbasal wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What was the ACTUAL lesson with these two? I can guess your intent, but could you specify? Also I think the grand father version instead of the baby version. Apple is massive...

* Build something people want and will pay for.

* Figure out what the product must look like early, and keep your vision consistent for a long time.

* Dive into the details of the product, and try to get quality at the lowest levels.

* Hire great and motivated people.

* Remove roadblocks that prevent people from moving quickly.

Those are the real lessons.

My current job does all of these, and doesn't do the "Treat people like shit," thing that is the core culture of Elon's companies. We move faster than the Elonverse companies, while working on a problem of similar difficulty.

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

#254

Post by hikawaii »

b33j0r wrote: post #235
SilverBirch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common fallacy. Modern businesses are enormous and succeed or fail for all sorts of reasons. Trying to figure out who is actually responsible for the success of a company is difficult. Just because a company is successful, doesn't mean every employee of the company is great. It's essential to understand what the dynamics of an industry is in order to understand why a company is successful. In the case of Sp…

A real-life reusable rocket that lands back on the pad was an exciting project to be a part of, no matter if you were doing it in a virtual sweatshop. I could see being part of that ultimate goal as being a motivation to work for the aliens from the Simpsons (don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!) But given the progressive nature of the projects and “for all of humanity” vision that was presented, I have always been dis…

They've only "cornered" access to LEO because they vastly outperform the competition in almost every conceivable category. That should get you a short term monopoly.

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

#255

Post by uoaei »

zpeti wrote: post #194
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…

Anecdotal, but I’ve found many people who complain about abusive managers are doing a terrible job and are looking for any excuse to be a victim or explain why their crap work is not appreciated. Misunderstood genius syndrome.

If a manager can't be kind even to underperforming employees, that makes them a bad manager.

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

#256

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #232
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #199

- it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners - so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people. Governments basically do this by providing schooling and health care to children till age of 18 or so. I mean the RoI on teaching Elon to read was fairly high. I wonder if his primary school teacher could get a lien on future earnings? - if MMT is right, then the problem is not li…

> it's frankly impossible to pick investment winners There's an entire industry of highly compensated people built around the idea that you can pick investment winners. > so a more sensible approach might be to provide smaller investments to more people. Banks have commercial lending departments that fill this function. Doesn't help with startup capital, but I doubt that is the limiting factor preventing most people…

>>> There's an entire industry of highly compensated people built around the idea that you can pick investment winners.

Just because someone pays you because you say you can pick winners, don't make it so. Top VCs like top Heege funds do get access to the best options - but the vast vast majority of those industries don't outperform index funds (after fees).

Plus even for the good ones, it's only the handful of major winners that compensate for their parlours ability to pick winners.

Bert Bachart was asked "what's the secret to a hit song" and he replied "If I knew that why would I write anything other than hit songs"

There is a world of difference between "I have an idea and if it goes wrong I have some good war stories" equity investment and "I have an idea and if it goes wrong I have a decade of debt to pay".

Really commercial lending departments are just part of the banks real roles of printing money and managing the temporal shifting of the liquidity illusion - ie helping existing businesses manage cashflow issues - startups is a tiny fraction of funding. yet startups is where the huge growth can only come from.

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

#258

Post by whiplash451 »

lostdog wrote: post #253
hungryforcodes wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the ACTUAL lesson with these two? I can guess your intent, but could you specify? Also I think the grand father version instead of the baby version. Apple is massive...

* Build something people want and will pay for. * Figure out what the product must look like early, and keep your vision consistent for a long time. * Dive into the details of the product, and try to get quality at the lowest levels. * Hire great and motivated people. * Remove roadblocks that prevent people from moving quickly. Those are the real lessons. My current job does all of these, and doesn't do the "Treat pe…

Where do you work?

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

#259

Post by cma »

abudabi123 wrote: post #224
nebula8804 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man. What breaks that argument is that multiple people make the same positive claims about Elon: That he can handle unimaginable amounts of stress that would break others, that he seems to have a breath of deep knowledge in various different engineering disciplines and that he is committed to his vision. Your theory would make more sense if everyone was making up random praise about him but the interview…

Elon M fried his braincells over at Tesla in an unwinnable situation which was saved by angel investors at the last moment. From that point in time to the present compare the advanced chips made at Tesla to Ford, GM for proof of Elon M and the vision thing. The Elon M companies fit together to tell a story that feels futuristic.

GM's Cruise, though it was an acquisition, feels more futuristic than FSD. They are operating driverless.

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

#260

Post by [deleted] »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #243
nebula8804 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astronaut Garrett Reisman worked for 7 years there and is on record stating that is all the stress he could handle.[1]: Jim Keller has a history of joining a company to start a project and then leaving once it is complete. He did this multiple times in his career and was with Tesla until they completed the self driving computer. He has also left behind a team of stellar well known people. I am not too sure about Andr…

I overlapped there with Garrett, and while our work rarely overlapped, he was certainly around and "in the trenches". My point is that, from my point of view, he was a real person rather than a figurehead. To some extent I could say the same for Elon, who was certainly around a lot. He was more of a general visiting the trenches, though. Also a real person, but of a different caste. I was one of those lower level eng…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN