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> > I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes. > What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur

> > I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes. > What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur you find so rewarding? The aerospace industry rewards making minor improvements to conventional airplanes rather than building something novel. Entrepreneurship rewards building something new and "radically different", which is what he was looking for in the first place.

mdorazio 6y ago
Counterpoint: exceedingly few tech entrepreneurship companies are doing anything at all that is really new and "radically different". Most are doing rather small and unimaginative things that make money by doing some equivalent of selling more ads. If the GP commenter was working at, for example, SpaceX (a large aerospace company), I can 100% guarantee their work would be more meaningful and rewarding than at basically any startup I've ever encountered. It often seems like it's a unique conceit of the HN community to think that most of the tech startups floating around here are really doing much more than established companies.
- Kiro 6y ago
  What's your definition of meaningful and rewarding? I'm an entrepreneur because I love waking up every day and do whatever I feel like. Nothing can be more rewarding for me. I'm not even that interested in what I'm building and it's certainly not something unique or special but it pays the bills and lets me be free.
  - mdorazio 6y ago
    For myself and most people in my circle of friends it's roughly: actively advancing the level of humanity. That means different things to different people - for some it's working on autonomous vehicles, for others it's space exploration, for others it's fighting climate change or poverty, etc. I think this is also related to age, though. When I was younger, most people I knew thought freedom and money were the best possible things in life.
    - nevertoolate 6y ago
      Wow! Downvoted? Wake up people, we are not so far away from a kind of an endgame of our current society and you feel injured by being called immature - it may mean that you are...
- aerosmile 6y ago
  I 100% get where you're coming from, but allow me to offer a counterpoint to your counterpoint. I don't know anyone who works at SpaceX, but a bunch of my classmates went to work for ULA (their competitor). I imagine that SpaceX is better managed, but the nature of work is the same - you're either calculating things using conventional wisdom, or you're writing simulations or coming up with other ways to achieve higher performance or save money. Either way, the work is slow and highly co-dependent on a million other moving parts. Once a project is complete, your ownership is unlikely to be higher than a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Also, at least at ULA, you better excel at selling your work internally. On the other hand, SV is littered with names of people who single-handedly turned unprofitable late-stage tech companies into major successes. There's less regulation, stakes are lower, capital requirements are lower, less of the available landscape has been claimed, and the industry lends itself well to the power of computation. It's a little bit like trying to get rich in 18th century England vs 18th century USA. Would it be fair for US farmers to claim that they are doing "radically different" work compared to their English counterparts? Perhaps the work looked similar ("put food on the table"), but the rules and opportunities were vastly different and created different outcomes for individuals (as in - the smartest/most fit/hardest working people got more out of their work).
  - mdorazio 6y ago
    I respect your perspective, but it's one I mostly see in younger people. It's basically that personal achievement and being able to single-handedly deliver things are the most meaningful outcomes of work. The perspective that I've come to accept is that very few things that actually impact the world can come about this way. We didn't put men on the moon because some genius did all the calculations and fabrication himself (even von Braun was only one part of a very large organization), we did it because thousands of smart and determined people set aside their personal ambitions to work together on something great. The downside of this, of course, is that everyone is effectively a cog in the machine and it's easy to get demoralized that your contributions don't mean much. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to actually change the world, you're unlikely to do actually do it at a tech startup. You're instead likely to talk a lot about it while the real world-changing things are happening elsewhere. But you'll probably be happier at the startup because you get more of that magic combination of autonomy, teamwork, and quickly tangible results. I just personally get frustrated that almost every startup and its employees act like they're working on the biggest problems in the world when they just... aren't. Edit: forgot to mention. I know two people who left ULA for similar reasons to you and went to SpaceX. They loved working at SpaceX in comparison to ULA because the level of company ambition, speed, and impact was so ridiculously higher. However, one of them left SpaceX to go to a smaller aerospace startup and the other is now at Raytheon for the superior work-life balance. I'm not sure what the lesson is there...

mdorazio 6y ago

Counterpoint: exceedingly few tech entrepreneurship companies are doing anything at all that is really new and "radically different". Most are doing rather small and unimaginative things that make money by doing some equivalent of selling more ads. If the GP commenter was working at, for example, SpaceX (a large aerospace company), I can 100% guarantee their work would be more meaningful and rewarding than at basically any startup I've ever encountered. It often seems like it's a unique conceit of the HN community to think that most of the tech startups floating around here are really doing much more than established companies.

Kiro 6y ago
What's your definition of meaningful and rewarding? I'm an entrepreneur because I love waking up every day and do whatever I feel like. Nothing can be more rewarding for me. I'm not even that interested in what I'm building and it's certainly not something unique or special but it pays the bills and lets me be free.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  For myself and most people in my circle of friends it's roughly: actively advancing the level of humanity. That means different things to different people - for some it's working on autonomous vehicles, for others it's space exploration, for others it's fighting climate change or poverty, etc. I think this is also related to age, though. When I was younger, most people I knew thought freedom and money were the best possible things in life.
  - nevertoolate 6y ago
    Wow! Downvoted? Wake up people, we are not so far away from a kind of an endgame of our current society and you feel injured by being called immature - it may mean that you are...
aerosmile 6y ago
I 100% get where you're coming from, but allow me to offer a counterpoint to your counterpoint. I don't know anyone who works at SpaceX, but a bunch of my classmates went to work for ULA (their competitor). I imagine that SpaceX is better managed, but the nature of work is the same - you're either calculating things using conventional wisdom, or you're writing simulations or coming up with other ways to achieve higher performance or save money. Either way, the work is slow and highly co-dependent on a million other moving parts. Once a project is complete, your ownership is unlikely to be higher than a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Also, at least at ULA, you better excel at selling your work internally. On the other hand, SV is littered with names of people who single-handedly turned unprofitable late-stage tech companies into major successes. There's less regulation, stakes are lower, capital requirements are lower, less of the available landscape has been claimed, and the industry lends itself well to the power of computation. It's a little bit like trying to get rich in 18th century England vs 18th century USA. Would it be fair for US farmers to claim that they are doing "radically different" work compared to their English counterparts? Perhaps the work looked similar ("put food on the table"), but the rules and opportunities were vastly different and created different outcomes for individuals (as in - the smartest/most fit/hardest working people got more out of their work).
- mdorazio 6y ago
  I respect your perspective, but it's one I mostly see in younger people. It's basically that personal achievement and being able to single-handedly deliver things are the most meaningful outcomes of work. The perspective that I've come to accept is that very few things that actually impact the world can come about this way. We didn't put men on the moon because some genius did all the calculations and fabrication himself (even von Braun was only one part of a very large organization), we did it because thousands of smart and determined people set aside their personal ambitions to work together on something great. The downside of this, of course, is that everyone is effectively a cog in the machine and it's easy to get demoralized that your contributions don't mean much. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to actually change the world, you're unlikely to do actually do it at a tech startup. You're instead likely to talk a lot about it while the real world-changing things are happening elsewhere. But you'll probably be happier at the startup because you get more of that magic combination of autonomy, teamwork, and quickly tangible results. I just personally get frustrated that almost every startup and its employees act like they're working on the biggest problems in the world when they just... aren't. Edit: forgot to mention. I know two people who left ULA for similar reasons to you and went to SpaceX. They loved working at SpaceX in comparison to ULA because the level of company ambition, speed, and impact was so ridiculously higher. However, one of them left SpaceX to go to a smaller aerospace startup and the other is now at Raytheon for the superior work-life balance. I'm not sure what the lesson is there...