The supplementary exercises to Baby Rudin I personally used to really understand real analysis. The other materials look great but unfortunately I haven't had time to work study and work through.
Great article. One of the better ones on the demise of Moxion Power. The other articles fail to really address what caused the company to fail. I will add some details from my personal experience.
I worked there from Nov 2023 through June 2024. Loved everything when I first joined, and I think things started going south when we moved to the 100k sq ft office next door. Nothing about that move felt right, we were hiring a bunch of people left and right but it seemed unclear what people were going to work on. Everything was big picture and future focused, while the day to day had much to be wanted.
Our web app was never fully utilized by customers. Product decisions were slow and as a result implementations were even slower. Some things shipped and were well received but overall it felt like everything took too long.
Perhaps even more alarming was the fact that the batteries commonly had issue such as faulting and not discharging. Not UL certified. Customers complained and at on point at least a third of the inventory was sitting in Richmond, CA behind our office, pending repairs or updates.
The employee structure was incredibly hierarchical. Every department had a VP and director(s), followed by middle managers, and finally ICs.
I'm going to come right out and say that the founders deserved this failure. The balance sheet was sitting right in front of their faces but they chose to delude themselves. Even amongst employees none of us wanted to acknowledge the fact that the company was in really bad shape. Looking back, after in-office lunch was canceled to "save money and extend runway", it's really interesting that nobody felt truly alarmed. I guess that was an exhibit of group think. We tried to not talk about it and people said the company was going to pull through, etc. To my knowledge, nobody chose to leap off of the sinking ship.
I know Paul cried on the last day and I felt bad for him but no one failed the company except the owners. Building a new factory to produce units at scale as our existing product was actively being rejected, what amount of hubris does that take? There's a lot of advice on how to build a startup out there i.e. "do things that don't scale", "default alive", but I guess every year there will be many companies choosing to ignore it, believing that somehow they will be the exception.
Another pitfall was not staying scrappy. The company was incredibly hierarchical and a bit top heavy, with dozens of directors and VPs. A lot of people hired based on mere "background" i.e. worked in cleantech previously rather than based on ability to lead or build. Departments were fairly siloed as a result of the management layers.
Thanks for bringing up some counterexamples. I want to point out that while Uber and Facebook raised massive amounts, they used the original capital effectively enough to produce business results convincing enough to secure new capital. This to me feels a bit more like Fast (https://www.businessinsider.com/stripe-backed-fast-is-shutti...)
Not my first startup experience. But definitely my first "typical blowup". The last startup I worked at the founders were probably too conservative, we never got past 5 employees and when the company folded there were six figures in cash still in the bank.
