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Comment by AYBABTME | Hacker News Reader

Anyone has insight into what BO's problems are? I heard that they had leadership problems but otherwise a top notch staff. People love to flame Jeff Bezos but if you look at his management of Amazon, I wouldn't dismiss him casually with regard to BO. He might not have the engineering chops of Musk but I'm sure he can put the right leadership in place to turn this ship around, now that he'll be focusing on this full time.

The industry needs a 2nd new generation provider. I don't harbour any fuzzy feelings for Bezos but I do hope BO will get somewhere, or that another company will. Perhaps RocketLab or Relativity Space?

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Brad Stone's newest book about Amazon goes into it. In short, Bezos hired leadership poorly. Those hires led to a culture akin to a legacy rocket company like ULA.

You know the meme about devs going to Google to rest and vest? That's the reputation Blue Origin has in the space industry according to Stone.

This, exactly. They hired the aerospace equivalent of IBM and Oracle executives to manage the company, and Bezos doesn't have the technical expertise to distinguish why this is bad. BO has a lot of former SpaceXers as junior/midlevel engineers who have moved on from "hustling" in their twenties under Musk, and now want to start families, and have lives, in Seattle.

Their problem was the Bezos hired a some Old Space guy as a CEO and his goal was to 'turn BlueOrigin into a series space company that can win government contract' and by that he means turning it into a traditional Old Space company.

But the way the new world works, that approach loses out against SpaceX.

And unlike the real Old Space companies BlueOrigin doesn't have lots of military contract or a airplane business to actually make money.

Talking to some friends who work at Blue Origin, one of the ways they compete for talent from SpaceX is by promoting a healthier, sustainable work culture.

While this is great for individuals, it also attracts a lot of people looking to coast. And of course the highly motivated, intelligent people who are willing to put in more time to make cool shit happen aren't going to settle for a distant runner up.

I suppose the real question is, will the SpaceX hare or the Blue Origin tortoise win the race in the long run. SpaceX might make amazing strides quickly, but if they burn out their workforce and fail to keep talent long term, they might suffer in coming years and decades.

They replace the workforce with all the eager new grads. They will continue to use employees till they burn out indefinitely

Which works to get you started fast, but something as complicated as rockets requires a lot of institutional knowledge. And if you lose too many employees too fast, you'll start to suffer from institutional alsheimers.

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