Channelling Bill Shockley

Techstars (an incubator company) and various aerospace companies have announced plans to launch a space incubator in LA. As TechCrunch reported:

Already a major hub for the space and aerospace startup industry, with companies like SpaceX, Relativity Space, Virgin Orbit, Rocket Lab, Phase Four, and others calling Los Angeles home, the new accelerator will provide another booster for LA’s growing startup scene.

The new aerospace program, called the Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator, will be managed by longtime Techstars managing director, Matt Kozlov, who previously helmed Techstars’ efforts at its health-focused accelerator done in partnership with Cedars Sinai.

LA was the country’s major aerospace hub from the 1930s until the end of the Cold War. But with the end of the space race, the downsizing of missile and military aircraft procurement — and the death of Douglas Aircraft and Lockheed’s commercial aircraft division — jobs were cut drastically and others moved to cheaper parts of the country.

The anchor of the new LA space hub is SpaceX, which moved to Hawthorne in 2008. It had been the headquarters of the firm founded by Jack Northrup in 1937, where it built the B-35, F-89 and F-5 military aircraft. (Its B-2 bomber was built at a secret factory in nearby Pico Rivera).

SpaceX is such a tough place to work that it has encouraged its employees to game the Glassdoor employer rating system. Despite this, 1/3 of the 1,109 SpaceX reviews complain about long hours, as with the review that said “There are times I work very long hours including a few times working 60 straight hours”. Last month, SpaceX — celebrating record success in 2018 — rewarded its loyal workforce with a 10% layoff.

Elon Musk has often imagined himself the next Steve Jobs, although Steve Jobs didn’t think so. Musk clearly needs to grow up and at 47 is well past the age when Jobs did so. Jobs was certainly grown up by 1998 (age 43) when his youngest child was born and he took the reins of Apple once again. Jobs also made his money in the commercial marketplace rather than manipulating investors and government procurement.

Instead, I think Musk is the next Bill Shockley. Shockley is known for inventing the field effect and bipolar junction transistors, which won him a share of the Nobel Prize. Late in life, he was known for saying controversial things about political and social issues.

However, (given his Bell Labs colleagues probably would have invented the transistor without him) perhaps his greatest contribution to mankind was creating Silicon Valley. In 1956, he founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California.

He was such an asshole as a boss that the next year eight of his leading employees (the “Tratorous Eight”) quit Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor — the first of thousands of spinoff companies to be formed in the Bay Area. The eight included Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce — cofounders of Intel — and Eugene Kleiner, cofounder of Kleiner Perkins.

So between his winning personality, stressful working conditions and past/future layoffs, Musk will be making thousands of skilled ex-SpaceX employees available to the LA aerospace labor market. As with Shockley, perhaps Musk’s greatest contribution will be attracting bright engineers to the region, who later take those skills to help get other startup companies off the ground.