SpaceX alums are branching out and shaping the startup economy
interactive.satellitetoday.com
interactive.satellitetoday.com
And even then it's only a handful of investements, with how much liquidity is/was in the market not surprising that people got a few million for moonshots given how the potential for a whole new industry.
[1] https://havewelanded.com/yc-space-sector-investments#:~:text...
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.
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.
I mean, only one of these stayed more than five years; one only stayed _two_ years. And, frankly, if you're in a leadership position in a company, you say nice things when you leave after two years. It is What is Done. I don't think you can really read much into these sorts of statements either way; they're pretty much following a formula.
I just got a new guy in January (didn't do the interview myself, I was away), I know his ex boss very well and of course I phoned him to know how he's like. He depicted me a kind of bad picture of him.
After 3 months I agree that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer. But unlike my friend, I'm not asking for perfect code, I'm asking for throughput and bold moves in the wilderness. With that consideration, the guy is actually ok compared to others!
I've come to learn to not rely a lot on outside advice on people, and I prefer to judge it myself in situ. The team, the company, the project or simply personal life can greatly affect someone's performances, and it is not because someone is great at company A that he will be great at company B.
As a younger self, when I heard a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I assumed that I'd have to work hard to reach their level, without realizing that they may actually not have a clue.
Now, when I hear a C-ranked executive talk about X who's a "fantastic engineer", I realize it's just name-dropping.
But, barring any information, my default assumption is now that it's name-dropping.
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.
[1]:https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/24/23654701/openai-elon-musk...
> 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.
I was going to comment on how this article is a Musk PR move. It's quite clear why the first thing he guts in a company is PR. He has simp's that will do it for free and because there is no official PR channel, a literal reality distortion field is created because only fanbois get access to the man, the myth, the legend.
Elon Fucking Musk!
Or it means they had little enough good to say about him that they had to google it.
Which means rested, attentive employees who are not going to be "rock stars", they're going to do the job correctly and then go home because that's what's required.
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 Andrej Karpathy. I dont know if we have enough of a history to know when he chooses to join and leave companies.
There must be a lot of lower level engineers who have to be developing all these amazing subsystems in the car and other products.
Wonder what the turn over is for the really skilled people. Maybe the truly burnt out people or just stragglers are the ones you are encountering.
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 engineers building stuff. I stuck around for 3 years, and left when I was happy rather than burnt out. It was my first job after school, and I wanted to try some other companies before settling down.
To stay in his circle of influence or because Elon is indeed a genius even though he doesn’t come across that way.
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.
Poor management or not viable?
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?
CA field grown lettuce gets the farmer less than half a dollar per head. Meanwhile: https://www.montereyherald.com/2022/12/16/11-for-a-head-of-l...
Expect price increases and food shortages this year because of rains in CA. We are not allowed to plant for 45-60 days after last rains so field can dry out.
The truth is that we do have a real food shortage situation now. The vertical farms won’t make a dent in making up the gap. Not even close.
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 themselves at the expense of everyone else.
One claimed to have worked closely with Elon, but after seeing him lie about so many other things I don’t trust anything he told us.
They were weirdly, unnecessarily ruthless in everything they did behind your back. But they were also highly polished and charismatic when addressing you directly.
Obviously this isn’t unique, but it was weird to see how consistent it was from this group of people.
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.
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 disappointed to hear these things about the operation. I’m glad I didn’t sign up, and it was tempting.
Look at outcomes. The whole thing was _actually_ about cornering access to LEO, the whole time. And it largely worked.
I guess around the time some of these crunchtimes have been reported, I was in some other crunchtime too!
My bias: “hey remember when we sat around and played foosball for lunch? We actually got a lot done anyway”
"The only thing that matters is product-market fit" -- Marc Andreesen
Being in a good market with the first product that can satisfy that market solves all sorts of management sins. Look at Twitter, Zenefits, Uber, WeWork, Zynga, Digg, etc. Or for that matter - how do you think Boeing, Lockheed, and NASA started looking like jokers?
Dominance in a market is usually an anti-signal for management quality, because it means you can get away with stuff that you couldn't in more competitive markets.
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.
* 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.
I’ve come to learn that if you do the things on your list well, some people are going to see that as being an asshole.
Clearing roadblocks quickly ( and nearly all roadblocks are made of people-problems after about 50+), insisting on certain aspects of a product vision for years, and engaging in someone else’s details are all strongly correlated with annoying someone.
I also learned that the assholes I knew were just the usual mean, dunning Kruger style people that exist everywhere. Those traits ultimately meant their inner circle perpetually excludes the kind of really great people you’d want to surround yourself with.
As as a software engineer, I'd rather buy my next car from an engineer who designed it rather than anyone else in the chain. Not because we speak similar languages but because I know that engineer will happily list ever bit of that makes them feel uncomfortable.
Engineers main task is to physically make something.
Even in software engineering something is being physically built up to run the software. We decided to call this the cloud because we let sales people define it. It ain't a cloud, you cannot fly a plane through it.
Construction is the one step that cannot be easily cheated. The machinery we build today is massive and complex so while the bureaucracy prevents a single engineer from addressing the issues, they are position to see see it.
My first question for a rocket company isn't the CEO's confidence. It is, would engineer #134 use this product with their families? Would you entrust the lives of our children to what you've built?
This is a great quote, btw.
But would they be able to code a single HTML page on their own? I doubt it. They definitely know how to spec one down to the last detail, but alas there's a distinction here. And I would also argue Tom might be a little biased in his opinion. I don't particularly have anything against Elon but I'm not surprised certain type of people with personality faults gravitate towards him.
Sure, I agree. However, there are many other examples that you can easily look up. But I do find the by amount of mental gymnastics in your response interesting.
I think it's fair to say that the opinion of those who have worked with Elon closely for many years hold the most weight. Compared to outsiders who just speculate on the internet.
Lol. Sounds like he indeed worked very closely with Mr. Musk.
> They were basically office politics machines, optimized to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else
> Obviously this isn’t unique
Most middle management is like that. You must be extremely lucky to work people who are not like these. During my 20 years I had maybe 3 people out of the 100 I have worked with who were decent and looked out for the people who they managed.
I've only had to deal with one bullshit machine and he quickly moved to another location, my guess is he is moving every time his bullshit has grown to difficult to keep up.
I have a similar experience but haven’t worked for any big tech or name brand companies. The vast majority were in the health tech space with a smattering doing things that would be considered ethically sound (ie. Solar energy marketplace).
I have had a couple nightmare supervisors who were obvious sociopaths, and have several who were incompetent, but for the most part only worked for folks with high EQ.
1. One nightmare CEO in an early stage tech startup.
2. A dozen managers at Mozilla, which ranked from "should have remained a dev" to "great managers". One of them was politically-minded, everybody else was truly attempting to make the team and the project work.
3. A few managers in a more recent tech startup, all of them good (albeit over-worked).
My experiences with management have been pretty positive. But I am biased: if my situation sucks -- I leave. Perhaps you stayed longer than you should have...
Pretty much seems to reflect the general populace. The figure seems to be actually better than the general populace.
There must be some double digit percentage of them who are genuinelly sculpted in specific way in that harsh working environment. Or you are saying that stressor doesn't make you better in any way (if you survive it).
Probability looks higher that you will find such people at ex-Space X group then other more relaxed and/or bureaucratically leaden companies, IMO.
They shower them with money because, as always, they don't know who is genuine and who is not, only results will tell but looks like a solid bet anyway, more then showering with money random engineer of ex anything.
So if you personally see a lot of failures, that doesn’t mean the VC model is failing. Although most VC funds lose money (there’s a power law for their returns too!)
Paul Graham wrote a scathing summary of VCs, and one reason for YC is to be more honest and fair (YC still aims for capitalist gains, they just play the game differently). http://paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html He also wrote that it is near impossible to pick investment winners (which is what VCs are “supposed” to do).
All the best with that!
He sucked.
Overnight he implemented all the bullshit meetings they had over there. At said meetings he wouldn't listen what people said, and he'd forget what tasks he'd tell people to focus, so the next meeting he'd scold people for wasting company time doing stuff that was not the task they had been assigned.
Layers of managers emulate this and treat people like shit in meetings. Not everyone, of course. You then have thousands of young freshly-graduated people who are in a range between not having a clue to believing they are hot shit because they come from a top university and work at SpaceX.
In the middle of all of this, you have a —-relatively speaking— small group of older, experienced people who make it all work. They work around folks who can’t create a decent Excel spreadsheet to save their lives and the “I have a Masters degree from MIT” crowd who truly need to be humbled.
Somehow the entire thing works. A reflection of society in some ways? It seems every company and society is, in some form, carried on the shoulders of a select few who actually get it and are capable enough to make it happen.
This is basically cargo culting/ type I error. I've worked for companies that were explicitly NOT this way, they were just fine.
Hell even my immediate boss at aforementioned company was not that way but he was tanked by my skip boss (the musk co. Guy) and immediately my productivity tanked too.
Sounds the type of person that typically gets promoted into those roles.
Misunderstood genius syndrome.
I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the ...
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 diaspora" should be the norm everywhere opportunity arises.
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 that try to court you will instead take a $10k check on the spot as an early investment. So not only do you diversify your investments and get a better class of equity with cash, you also get the upside of guaranteed outcomes on a salary.
I mean obviously if you start a company you want to optimize for it making profit, but the original goal should be, primarily, totally disconnected from money. Any monetary benefits should be a side effect of providing value. In the most ideal world, your equity turns into cash 10-15 years later, but you shouldn't set out with that being your goal.
My perspective on this is coming from someone who made easy money on a ridiculous business selling proxies to SEO spammers in college, and I didn't know what to do with the money (I spent it all on worthless shit). I've learned I'm much happier when I'm meeting some minimal survival baseline while trying to build a sustainable organization that produces a useful product.
Example: taking 80k/yr out of college while having to retire 2k/month of college debt, then using the rest to afford bay area rent + commuting expenses + rest of life would have been hard and arguably not a good use of a young person's early career phase. They might opt instead to work at a bigco until their debt was sufficiently retired, then with the safety net of {an established career + no debt + some money in the bank} swinging for the fences at a startup later. You're more likely to get leadership roles at startups when you have a few years under your belt anyway.
I think this is half-right. When I evaluate startups I'm often expecting FAANG pay, but I don't expect some of the benefits. Generally the hefty expectation is in RSUs, because at a FAANG those are almost a third of what I make. I also don't accept inflated future leaning valuations, I rate them at current value. If I'm taking a gamble on a third of my salary I want to put the risk multiplier on that third, so I'll charge more.
Passion can get you so far in startups, but if you're engineer (especially not engineer zero) then you likely won't walk away with much unless you're accurately assessing risk. That said, there's a fair amount of startups that are not worried about having a reputation of early engineers working away with very little.
That said, I still have a mortgage and that's what informs my strategy when dealing with startups. If I didn't have a mortgage, I'd probably accept lower RSUs and a higher cash incentive.
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.
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.
How often are you seeing these deals?
In my experience, any company raising in increments of $10K is really only doing so as a way to get people invested (literally) so they can continue to hit them up for funding, connections, and networking later on. $10K doesn’t really go very far in terms of paying employees.
Of course that’s fine if it works out that way, but I’ve also seen companies who gather $10K from every random person who can invest end up with some wacky cap tables, which becomes a turnoff to future investors. This creates weird situations where they put a lot of pressure on buying people out of their investments just to clean up the cap table. Again, could be fine for a quick turnaround but it’s not quite the same as investing for the long term.
And then there’s the fact that most angel investments are just going to go to zero, but that’s the nature of the game.
I take the opposite approach, but with some caveats. Your financial success in any market is going to come down to information advantage - you need to have better data and better insights on the success of your investment than your competing investors. In general, you have much better data and insight into the risk factors and success probability of your own startup than you do into any startups you angel invest in. You also have better data on your own startup than you do on startups you work for, but probably have better data on how a startup you're employed at is doing than the investors in that startup do. Therefore you can make better choices about where to spend your equity (either sweat or monetary) when you're working for the company.
The major caveat - and one that took a lot of hard lessons for me to learn - is that you have to actually pay attention to that data. If your gut tells you it's not going to work out, cut your losses and find some other opportunity, regardless of sunk costs, how much you might be emotionally attached to the company, how much you love your coworkers, your fear of letting them down, etc.
But similarly, you also end up with a much higher-resolution model of the business world from actually experiencing work at several different startups than you would get from angel-investing in startups. So unless you've previously experienced worked at or founded startups, your angel-investing is basically going to be spray-and-pray, and do a lot worse than investing in your own company stock or even index funds.
No startup offers such high salaries.
The highest cash portion I’ve seen at mid to late stage startups was around 175k for a senior SWE. Equity offered was in the five digits, but I was coming from a boring enterprise company and not a hot FAANG.
You aren't negotiating with a startup against their current bank account. Their bank account is only relevant in determining what they can _afford_, not how much they should pay. They should never pay more than they can afford, that's bad for both of you, but beyond that there is no ceiling to how much they should pay.
You are negotiating against the pool of risk-adjusted returns you are going to provide the startup. The more directly coupled you are to their ability to fundraise and generate revenue, the larger the pool of risk-adjusted returns you are negotiating with them against.
If there is a high probability that $10m in value over the next few years will directly result from hiring you, $10m that would be hard to unlock with any other hire, you aren't negotiating a salary anymore. You are negotiating your share of that $10m.
An oversimplified example: Let's say you expect to deliver that over 5 years. A $500k offer that is 50% equity is a 25% share with half paid upfront in yearly installments.
If you close that deal, the company is appraising the expected return of hiring you vs. the risk of the impact to their runway and making the bet that reducing their runway by ~$30k/mo will payoff without them going bankrupt.
I've found this is a good rule to follow in general. I never pay myself with value I don't unlock. I always appraise my salary, contracting rates, etc. by estimating the expected ROI for the work I do and I pay myself out of that. If I overdraw (charge more than the ROI), I won't take the job.
As an aside, this is part of the reason why (I believe) CEOs are so well compensated. They obviously provide value. But that value is incredibly difficult to measure. You know a good CEO is extremely valuable and a bad CEO is extremely expensive, but you don't exactly know how to measure the value they really unlock. So, short of an actual appraisal, they are perceived as infinitely valuable. Since neither side in the negotiation knows the true dollar value of a CEO, they are negotiating against what the company can afford since they both know the company will pay as much as they can afford to get a CEO.
https://www.engadget.com/tesla-sues-engineer-dojo-trade-secr...
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-lawsuit-supercomputer-...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/tesla-sues-former-employee...
---
I think the key is that these startups aren't competing with SpaceX, but are rather SpaceX-adjacent.
There is also a uniqueness to the industry that SpaceX operates in, in that everyone is basically the US government, or the US government with a layer of paint. SpaceX isn't exactly going to sue the hand that feeds it, even if it's wearing a Boeing-logo glove.
> 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.
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 farce regarding Martin Tripp. Musk retaliated against Tripp for whistleblowing on safety at Tesla, and then tried to have him murdered by the cops by calling 911 and accusing Tripp of being a mass shooter.
See also: When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower[1]:
> It started with a Twitter meltdown and ended with a fake mass shooter. A former security manager says the company also spied and spread misinformation.
I'm not going to take Tesla at their word when they have an extensive history of using bogus lawsuits to intimidate people.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
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.
I bet £100 to the charity of your choice that this is false.
As to the lawsuits, generally don't take any of your employers code or data with you when you leave, and you'll be fine.
In the end I agree vindication will come if you can afford to defend yourself, hire your own experts and retain competent council but your comment is a bit glib.
Please and thank you.
I think the person you're replying to is wondering why the other 25 million of us aren't doing the same.
From a financial perspective it is much more probable to become a millionaire through a FAANG than a startup right now.
Crush it at FAANG for a few years and don’t spend like crazy and you’ll be a multimillionaire.
Starting from $0, this requires saving $125k a year for 21 years to reach $10.06M at an 11.88% interest rate, which is the S&P500 average. Well within the capability of any senior SWE @ FAANG, and it only takes 4 years to get to senior.
But then capital gains taxes hit.
Anyways, yes, a startup employee on the other hand can become a deca-millionaire in a year or two.
If you work at a big tech company you can improve the products used by millions if not billions of people. I find that very rewarding.
I don't enjoy the work at Google as much due to bureaucracy, pace of work and politics. I previously worked at a startup and there is a stark difference in the work culture and environment. I'm working with the exact same team as that at the startup (we got acquired by Google). The same people i enjoyed working with, I absolutely hate it now.
Nothing ever gets done, even when it is possible to do so. Folks around here call it perf-farming.
That said, many googlers do _not_ end up impacting millions or billions of users. So GP is a lucky one. Google has a lot of people working on infra, internal tooling, and subfeatures within products that don't / are hard to connect to usage.
* The nonprofit was a nice experience but burnt me out more than once. At some point, you need to have some time off. Being in an early stage startup discourages you from ever taking a break. Being in a nonprofit discourages you from ever taking a break. Being in both... well, eventually, I had to leave to preserve my sanity.
* One startup turned out to largely be a con against VCs and one of the founders pulled the rug, vanishing on his cofounder and all the employees. Needless to say... that was a disappointment.
* The last one burnt me out pretty deeply. 15 years later, I still can't use the technology stack we were using at the time, despite the fact that I was one of the most notable names in that community.
Since then, I've said no to such offers. That is, I'm happy to join a startup, but I will not be a very early employee. I will keep myself in a position where I can afford to take a break if I feel a burnout coming, something I could not do as a cofounder.
So yeah, I very much understand why not everybody creates a startup. That and the fact that once you have created the startup, you need to work on so many things that are not what you wanted to do in the first place, from gathering fundings to paying taxes to securing parking spaces for your employees.
YMMV
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.
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.
We're in agreement here, but it's I think a broader discussion on how media companies make money and where we stand as consumer, in particular how we feel about RIAA/MPAA.
I still think Google is doing a good job, better than most of us would have predicted, but I personally would have preferred a world where Youtube was viable on its own. Looking at Spofify for instance.
> FB buying Instagram
Even the regulating agencies that let the deal pass are looking back at it as a wrong decision.
I personally can't find any single meaningful aspect where we benefit from FB owning Instagram.
I partially fault Instagram for having a shitty business plan aimed at being acquired from the start, and kinda wish they had to make the hard decisions at the end instead of selling the whole audience to the worst company to handle it.
If the FTC clamps down on acquisitions, there's going to be correction in valuations, and some statups will get killed by VCs who view modest successes as not worth their time.
1. Only being slightly hyperbolic
So the whole startup game becomes a petri dish for incumbents to see the natural selection of ideas and pick up the viable ones without paying for the failed experiments, and the VCs footing the bill as long as their balance sheet works out in the end.
Mostly because I think the main value is captured by embedding these things into existing programs and workflows. “AI-powered” won’t really attract anyone to a new app when it’s so easy to add AI to existing ones. Also basing an idea around an OpenAI API seems fragile.
But it could totally just be that I lack innovative ideas.
The h1s and tns, etc are locked in
This is why the company needs patents. They protect everyone. /s
Ah yes, "more recent technical debt is newer, therefore better" is the way of today!
There is pretty high turn-over at the large companies as well. People can be there to help build their resume, help make connections, learn the ropes at a large company and gain technology exposure, etc..
My time at Amazon, I did see some people leave to form companies. Generally it was when someone particularly smart found a clique of a few other smart people and they then all quit and go off and do something else.
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.
At least in our blind chat it seems there are several other like-minded people.
Yeah, risk. Disruption is considerably harder than you might imagine, it's not about 'products' it's about market power.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
I'm sure there are similar things for FireFox or Chromium browsers but Hush seems Safari-only.
AdGuard has most all filters enabled except the language-specific ones and the «Other» category.
It’s been how many years now and GDPR has done very little to improve anything despite the cookie prompts on websites everywhere?
At this point they are as useful as TOS (not) with the annoyance of seeing one every website.
But if it was only Firefox, people would simply add banners saying "Firefox is not supported." since it's only like 3% of marketshare these days.
The distinction is legal, not technical; so it has to be enforced by legal, not technical means.
Furthermore, there is the important distinction about multiple uses of the same data. There are uniquely identifiable cookies that are functionally required for one purpose but the site may want to use it for other purposes as well (e.g. share that data with heir "trusted partners" for targeted advertising) for which user may reasonably want to refuse permission, so a browser accepting a cookie doesn't imply such permission and something extra is required.
- if MMT is right, then the problem is not limited capital but limited investment opportunities- but if we invest in everyone - what does that mean or look like?
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 from starting a successful business.
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.
It’s not the primary school teacher that made the investment. It’s whomever was bankrolling salaries and expenses for teachers, cafeteria workers, buildings to house the activity …
The “lien” on future income would likely be “taxes” (assuming public school here.)
"the human economy is a whole, even within countries seeing government as a cost to be minimised, taxes to be avoided and private investment as somehow privileged"
is a poor analysis.
I mean such a huge amount of private spending is trying to alter "predominant cultural norms" - advertising etc. yet breakout successful companies tend to break at just the right time that their PMFit barely needs advertising.
Less dinosaurs trying to look cool and more evolved companies would help - and it would help in that we have constant turn over of companies would mean we were measuring actual productivity better - very useful in MMT terms.
Somehow I am feeling towards our tournament style approach of allocating the power to allocate resources is false. We have young democracies, but work in dictatorships - and invest in similar ways.
I think basically we need to find better ways of "doing democracy". imagine voting on internal projects? it will hurt but if we think democracy works then open discussion and decision making actually will result in stronger companies - or just a return of capital !
Which society paid for Musk to be educated? He grew up in South Africa. How much tax does he pay there relative to where he built his stuff? Where should he pay his taxes?
What about other people who grow up elsewhere and move? Is it ok to hire a load of doctors from other countries?
And Inthink that is the ultimate global goal here. Which is ... science fiction
Imagine how immigration would look different if South Africa had a lien on ex-citizens taxation - if a slice of every sales tax paid in Nevada by a Mexican citizen went back to Mexico City.
I am not sure how it plays out - but it's possible that countries that benefit from immigration have to pay for it.