🍪 Non-cringe life advice and Elon says get back in the office or GTFO

Howdy, friends! This is Bite Sized Beta, where we deliver <5 min of tech insights so unbelievable you might mistake us for Amber Heard.

Let’s dive in.

In the oven this week:

• 🔥 Freshly baked: Elon’s building a team of missionaries

• ☝🏼 One big pizookie: one piece of life advice that isn’t a giant eye roll

• 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 3 highlights of the week

• 😂 Snickerdoodles: because when is it ever a bad time for memes??

FRESHLY BAKED

Seems like everyone and their grandma is offering a fully remote option for their employees these days. Even Apple, which initially took a hard stance on forcing employees back to the office, has since delayed its plan after major employee pushback.

But can we ever count on Elon to go with the crowd? Nope!

In an email to Tesla employees, Elon says everyone is required to spend 40 hours a week in the office. No ifs, ands, or buts.

According to him, it’s time to get with the program or take a hike.

Think you’re a senior employee that can worm your way out of this one? Nice try - according to the new policy, those that are more senior have to be even MORE visible than everyone else. And if you simply just don’t show up, consider yourself resigned.

As expected, he got some pushback. But being Elon, he had a pithy response queued up:

Our take? It kinda makes sense… I mean, who would trust a car designed by someone that had never seen the thing in real life?

On the other hand, it could push non-hardware employees to leave. Being in the office for 40 hours a week is a tough sell these days… especially when your company lags behind the industry in compensation and doesn’t offer free kombucha at the office.

Total pay for a Level 2 (entry level + 1) software engineer:

• Tesla: $163,845

• Microsoft: $193,707

• Amazon: $238,849

• Meta: $268,309

• Google: $269,305

Sure, Tesla stock has gone insane mode since the pandemic, but that’s still a ~64% difference between Tesla and Google. If you thought Bezos was stingy, Elon’s a miser.

So what’s Tesla’s strategy to compete for talent?

Attracting missionaries over mercenaries.

Let me explain.

According to John Doerr (legendary VC that first invested in Amazon & Google), there are 2 types of people at every company - missionaries and mercenaries.

Mercenaries are the people you hate working with on group projects. They optimize for themselves ahead of everything else. These guys are short-term greedy, not long-term greedy. And while they might be good at their jobs, everything’s transactional and they have about as much loyalty to you as Tristan Thompson does to Khloe Kardashian.

Missionaries care about making money, but are motivated by a higher calling. They want to help people and make a mark in the world. Missionaries play the long game, so they’re down to take some short term L’s if they get to win eventually.

Companies like Tesla with strict rules and limited perks offer the missionary promise of making a big impact in the world. Just look at the last paragraph of Elon’s email from this week:

If that’s not appealing to you, you might be more mercenary than missionary, at least towards Tesla’s charter.

Elon’s building a team of missionaries. All the mercenaries can GTFO.

THE BIG PIZOOKIE

It’s graduation season, so to all the graduates (and those that aren’t), here’s one of the best pieces of life advice I’ve read that’s not a trope.

Mike Speiser (a VC) came up with this, and for once, I’d encourage you to read the whole thing and not just my summary of it.

……Buuut since we’re all lazy, here’s my quick summary of it!!

Speiser starts by comparing how we invest our money with how we invest our time.

If you invest in the stock market as a teenager, you give your money your entire life to compound. You could theoretically invest less money at age 15 and have more money in 50 years than someone investing slightly more starting at age 30, just because your money has had more time to earn a return.

Makes sense, right?

The same concept applies to time. When you invest early in something you care about (work, skills, hobbies, etc.), you give this investment more time to compound. By the time you reach your 40’s, you’re miles ahead of people who spent their 20’s on vacation in Italy. You could probably do the same task in half the time because you’ve done the reps and built the muscle memory.

The takeaway: if you start earlier, you get further later.

Now here’s the problem: everyone seems to want work life balance nowadays. People want to make millions and also have a chill life with 30 days of PTO to spend with their emotional support peacock.

But if you have a lot of life now, you’ll probably need to work more later since you haven’t accumulated enough work output. If you work more now, you’ll build up enough work productivity to get more life later.

Under-investing your time early in life is like spending your earnings on entertainment vs. on things that will grow more valuable over time. It’s time to find something you love and start compounding your time in it. Let’s go!!

COOKIE CRUMBS

• Sequoia Capital: don’t expect a quick recovery from the current market drawdown. In a Zoom call to founders, Sequoia (VC that first funded Google, Airbnb, Apple, etc.) says it’s time to hunker down. We won’t see a recovery like the one that followed the pandemic in 2020, since we’ve exhausted all potential monetary and fiscal policy tools. Sequoia is one of many investors sounding the alarm bells - David Sacks and Ray Dalio did the same and we covered it two weeks ago. Buckle up guys, it’s gonna be a lonnng winter.

• It’s a tech employee graveyard with layoffs topping 90K since March. Some notable losers: Bolt (fintech), Better.com (home mortgage), On Deck (tech networking platform) and Cameo (influencer video messaging) each laid off ~30% of their workers.

• Sheryl is leaving Meta to focus on philanthropy. Huge news from the COO who sat at the helm for 14 years and was the chief architect of Meta’s ads business. Meta has been known to have a tight circle of homies at the top of the totem pole, so Sheryl leaving definitely leaves a big gap in the mafia friend group. A coincidence that she chose to share the news a mere minutes after the Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard verdict was announced? 🤔 Touché PR team, touché.

SNICKERDOODLES

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