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SpaceX has done such a phenomenal job rebuilding from scratch. How is it not obvious to you rebuilding airlines from scratch is also the best route?

toomuchtodo 2y ago
Lottery tickets are not policy. SpaceX took decades to get to the success they realize today, having been founded in 2002, and it took a lot of luck to build a rocket shop from scratch. We must realize that companies are not built out of Legos, but ecosystems that require care, feeding, and are fragile systems.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX,… how many times does someone “win the lottery” before it’s not actually chance? Not saying anyone can repeat it, or a random IC could leave and succeed, but that space seems ripe for disruption. (Maybe not passenger planes, but cargo with less liability.)
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    If 90% of startups fail, why would you think winning wasn't mostly chance? Regardless of how many people work hard and grind, you can still fail (and most do, that's just life). Some are more lucky than others, and capital begets capital. Once you've "won" enough, it becomes much harder to lose, even if you make terrible forward decisions and run off the inertia of past wins (Twitter). Bezos built Amazon, but also has sunk somewhere between $10B and $20B into Blue Origin and it is still not terribly successful, for example, and demonstrates that even with resources and skill that success is potentially out of reach. So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled to do their best work, while keeping out of their way. Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k workers, and successfully deliver products to customers that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating customer confidence in the product and the org. https://luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/ https://luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/ https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution... https://escholarship.org/content/qt6668s4pz/qt6668s4pz.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt6668s4pz/qt6668s4pz.pdf
    - double0jimb0 2y ago
      Bezos doesn’t know how to build good hardware. Plenty of examples from Amazon. Then add Blue Origin to that track record.
      - toomuchtodo 2y ago
        Sure, but can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Or, is it culture and an intangible ability to procure and orchestrate great people doing great work that leads to success? Think in systems. If you have the resources, and the physics demonstrate it can be done, the system is not properly configured, no?
        double0jimb0 2y ago
        can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Clearly not in Bezos’s case. There is no magic involved here, some people have the skill/experience to lead the design, build, and selling of innovative hardware, others don’t. For example, for designing new rockets, one of the major things Musk innovated at SpaceX was the traditional aerospace design cycle. Instead of spending 5 years on countless analyses and few actual tests, like the incumbents did/do, SpaceX built and destructed as many prototypes as possible, learning rapidly and innovating. Musk knows what innovative design truly requires. What did Bezos do? He hired a bunch of ex-Lockheed and Boeing engineers/leads (from an industry that for decades has not felt market-driven pressure to innovate), and those engineers/leads just kept doing things the old fashion way. When the person in charge (Bezos) misses this detail, no amount of money or wishful thinking will fix this.
    - somenameforme 2y ago
      I don't entirely understand this logic. 99.9% of players that play competitive chess will never make master, but of course nobody would then say that becoming a chess master is just down to chance. What percent of startups are just bad ideas, outright cons, hair brained money-first schemes, or people entering into competitive domains (like eateries) without sufficient skill? IMO you're probably pushing 90% there! To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this just seems like it should be obvious. The vision, talent, and other such things are just so radically different. For instance Musk picked up his first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and political cronyism to use as crutches. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller
  - gosub100 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - charlie0 2y ago
      100%. Unfortunately, not all can separate the art from the artist.
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story: Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking: Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well. Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk. So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO. He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java. The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence. Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon. Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks. I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.
    - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
      He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com. This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.
    - jonhohle 2y ago
      I suppose I would like to be as unsuccessful as that.
- mensetmanusman 2y ago
  If you think engineering is like a lottery, you may want to stop buying lottery tickets.

toomuchtodo 2y ago

Lottery tickets are not policy. SpaceX took decades to get to the success they realize today, having been founded in 2002, and it took a lot of luck to build a rocket shop from scratch. We must realize that companies are not built out of Legos, but ecosystems that require care, feeding, and are fragile systems.

jonhohle 2y ago
PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX,… how many times does someone “win the lottery” before it’s not actually chance? Not saying anyone can repeat it, or a random IC could leave and succeed, but that space seems ripe for disruption. (Maybe not passenger planes, but cargo with less liability.)
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  If 90% of startups fail, why would you think winning wasn't mostly chance? Regardless of how many people work hard and grind, you can still fail (and most do, that's just life). Some are more lucky than others, and capital begets capital. Once you've "won" enough, it becomes much harder to lose, even if you make terrible forward decisions and run off the inertia of past wins (Twitter). Bezos built Amazon, but also has sunk somewhere between $10B and $20B into Blue Origin and it is still not terribly successful, for example, and demonstrates that even with resources and skill that success is potentially out of reach. So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled to do their best work, while keeping out of their way. Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k workers, and successfully deliver products to customers that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating customer confidence in the product and the org. https://luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/ https://luisazhou.com/blog/startup-failure-statistics/ https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution-of https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/billionaires-and-the-evolution... https://escholarship.org/content/qt6668s4pz/qt6668s4pz.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt6668s4pz/qt6668s4pz.pdf
  - double0jimb0 2y ago
    Bezos doesn’t know how to build good hardware. Plenty of examples from Amazon. Then add Blue Origin to that track record.
    - toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Sure, but can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Or, is it culture and an intangible ability to procure and orchestrate great people doing great work that leads to success? Think in systems. If you have the resources, and the physics demonstrate it can be done, the system is not properly configured, no?
      - double0jimb0 2y ago
        can you not hire people who are good at hardware with billions of dollars of investment? Clearly not in Bezos’s case. There is no magic involved here, some people have the skill/experience to lead the design, build, and selling of innovative hardware, others don’t. For example, for designing new rockets, one of the major things Musk innovated at SpaceX was the traditional aerospace design cycle. Instead of spending 5 years on countless analyses and few actual tests, like the incumbents did/do, SpaceX built and destructed as many prototypes as possible, learning rapidly and innovating. Musk knows what innovative design truly requires. What did Bezos do? He hired a bunch of ex-Lockheed and Boeing engineers/leads (from an industry that for decades has not felt market-driven pressure to innovate), and those engineers/leads just kept doing things the old fashion way. When the person in charge (Bezos) misses this detail, no amount of money or wishful thinking will fix this.
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I don't entirely understand this logic. 99.9% of players that play competitive chess will never make master, but of course nobody would then say that becoming a chess master is just down to chance. What percent of startups are just bad ideas, outright cons, hair brained money-first schemes, or people entering into competitive domains (like eateries) without sufficient skill? IMO you're probably pushing 90% there! To me the main thing that the failure of Blue Origin demonstrates is that the notion of "business" as some generalizable and all-applicable skill is nonsense. Bezos has done an amazing job of overseeing a digital marketplace, but that doesn't somehow mean he'd be amazing at overseeing an aerospace company. To me this just seems like it should be obvious. The vision, talent, and other such things are just so radically different. For instance Musk picked up his first engine engineer [1] based on engines the guy was literally building in his garage. Bezos just staffed Blue Origin with a bunch of people from old space, and so it seems quite unsurprising that you just end up with another Boeing, but without the legacy hardware and political cronyism to use as crutches. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Mueller
- gosub100 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - charlie0 2y ago
    100%. Unfortunately, not all can separate the art from the artist.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Obligatory repeat of this detail, since you're talking about PayPal as a Musk success story: Musk had very little to do with the success of PayPal. I'm not even talking in terms of the "Gwynne Shotwell is the real genius of SpaceX" naysayers. I'm talking: Musk had an attempt at an online bank that was ... not going well. Confinity had done what Musk couldn't - had built a prototype/MVP of PayPal. They'd already got it running. They had trademarks, everything. At this point, they'd created PayPal having nothing to do with Musk. So Musk and his company architected a merger with Confinity. As a result of this merger, Musk was the largest shareholder, and was made the first CEO. He remained CEO for only four MONTHS, most of which he spent trying to be stubborn about throwing away the entire prototype to rewrite it in Windows/IIS and Classic ASP (i.e. Visual Basic) because he didn't understand Solaris and Java. The Board got so sick of this that a couple of days after his four month anniversary, when he'd just left for two weeks off on his honeymoon of all things, they fired him in his absence. Think about how badly you have to fuck up as a CEO of a company that you're the major shareholder in that they fire you (no "concentrating on my family", no "exploring other opportunities"), AND do it while you're on your honeymoon. Following that, Musk's "contribution" to PayPal was mostly collecting shareholder dividend checks. I despise Musk. But I will give him credit for his contributions to Tesla and to SpaceX. PayPal, though? That's just another rewriting of history to support the Musk idolatry.
  - TheAmazingRace 2y ago
    He also has his long and obnoxious obsession with x.com. This spanned back to PayPal and he had to try this crap again with the Twitter rebrand, that frankly hasn't worked all that well, because most within my circle still call it by the old name Twitter.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    I suppose I would like to be as unsuccessful as that.
mensetmanusman 2y ago
If you think engineering is like a lottery, you may want to stop buying lottery tickets.