(2022-11-15) Solana Surviving And Thriving In Techs New Winter

Mike Solana: Surviving and Thriving in Tech's New Winter. Last week, Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — laid off more than 11,000 employees. As early as this week, Amazon is expected to lay off as many as 10,000

While tech’s new winter is no dot-com crash, the industry does appear to be entering an era of uncharacteristic austerity. Where teams aren’t already gutted, hiring is frozen, and budgets are slashed.

Climbing interest rates have increased the cost of risk, which means 1) easy venture funding is no longer something any company, at any stage, can rely on, and 2) the future profits of high-growth tech companies are now discounted

I think what’s happened is something like this: in an era of endless, easy cash, productivity expectations naturally decoupled from compensation expectations, and tech workplaces gradually became identities. As working at a place like Twitter is now less a job than it is a kind of nationality, it is perfectly understandable why the remaining Twitter malcontents who haven’t yet been fired responded to their new boss, and everyone close to him, as if he were trying to kill them.

Mark Zuckerberg has plowed another $10 billion into his Metaverse.

it’s not popular. In fact, it’s not even popular at Meta.

“No one at the company even uses these headsets,” he said. “Everyone believes they’re the future, but they just collect dust.”

How long have we not believed in what we were doing?

There are, of course, many examples to the contrary. In terms of meaningful technological advance that also dovetails with success in business, companies like SpaceX, Tesla, and Palantir come to mind. More recently, we have Anduril.

I’ve recently watched with surprise as popular “tech positive” influencers turned on Elon Musk for — roughly their position — “destroying” Twitter.

his “embarrassing” approach to product development. This last piece has been, I think, largely a repulsion grounded in aesthetics. Elon is building in public, and therefore making mistakes in public. The word “clown” has been invoked. (Working In Public)

The notion all this public brainstorming and building and hacking and shipping and failing and starting over is unseemly, or is in some way a bad look for tech, is also — from a “tech” influencer — just incredible.

This is winter now. If you can’t find food you die. Twitter was losing money when Elon took the company. We’re not watching him destroy anything, we’re watching him try to save a product he believes important, and similar battles are taking place across the industry. They’re just happening in private.

Recently, it occurred to me I haven’t met a founder who started their company in a garage for about a decade. Palmer Luckey was maybe the last one.

When did “scrappy startup culture” start to mean a coworking space with catered lunches and a weekly happy hour for $10 thousand a month?

Moving forward into such uncertain times, my hope for the industry is everyone who wants a fat, easy paycheck packs up their bags and finds their way back to finance or consulting. My hope is this industry becomes safe for optimists again, for courageous thinkers crazy enough to risk everything for a company or piece of technology they know, in their bones, the world needs.

Summer camp is over. It’s time to go to work. Why not work on something cool as hell?