An incredibly stupid startup coup, and other drama
There was no shortage of Silicon Valley drama this week
This Week in Silicon Valley Outsider:
The (ham-handed) coup attempt at Coinbase
Founder Ryan Peterson stepping aside as CEO of Flexport
People being mean to Pipedream, a new startup, for no good reason
A mind-blowing technical advance by Zipline that makes drones safer
⭐ This Week's Top Story: Burn (a specific subset of) the executives!
This week, a group of anonymous employees at crypto-exchange startup Coinbase attempted to overthrow their COO, Chief People Officer, and Chief Product Officer.
It was an incredibly stupid coup. They inexplicably didn’t attempt to replace the CEO who manages all three executives; their demand letter was rambling and, at times, debatably contradictory; and it’s an obvious case of kicking a startup while it’s already down.
The reality of startup life is that times will be hard, and when they are, employees resort to fight or flight. As a leader, you hope that you’ve hired a team of fighters, but with a company like Coinbase – which grew from a $1 billion startup in 2017 to a $75 billion publicly-traded behemoth in 2021 – you will inevitably let in a few folks who are trying to join a winner and make a quick buck.
This coup was even one step worse than pure flight, however: it was driven by a group of people too afraid to fight and too afraid to leave! They wanted to stay at the company, and they couldn’t figure out how to effect change from within, so they attempted to make a media splash to get attention from the very top of the company.
And they got what they wished for – in the form of a scathing rebuke from their CEO, Brian Armstrong, on Twitter.
This is a fantastic example of how not to make change happen – and a glimpse inside some of the high-flying startups you read about in Silicon Valley press. Even companies worth $75 billion have lots of room for internal improvement.
⚙️ This Week's Coolest Hardware
Flying drones is hard; drones flying themselves is even harder.
There’s plenty of room to avoid obstacles in the sky, but if you, like Zipline, are building the world’s largest autonomous on-demand delivery system, there are lots of obstacles to avoid and lots of varied environments in which you have to avoid them. Rain, snow, fog, darkness – these challenges to traditional, visual methods of detecting and avoiding obstacles have proved incredibly difficult to surmount.
But Zipline recently made a huge breakthrough not by kicking down the door, but instead by finding a way around the wall.
Their answer: auditory obstacle detection. So sick.
📰 This Week's Best Headlines
A few months after making the cover of Forbes for founding $8 billion shipping startup Flexport (and single-handedly demystifying major supply chain failures), Ryan Petersen announced that he’s stepping aside as CEO to make room for longtime Amazon exec Dave Clark.
Hyperlogistics startup Pipedream announced a $1.6 million pre-seed funding round this week, which made the internet very angry. Luckily, CEO Garrett Scott is the world’s best internet troll defuser. I interviewed Garrett for an older edition of Outsider, and he’s the real deal. Keep an eye on them, no matter what you think about their idea!
Andreessen Horowitz, the world’s best Venture Capital fund, is building out a new practice area that they’re calling American Dynamism – intended to focus on aerospace, defense, and other hard tech. And, truly unbelievably, they just hired one of my friends from elementary school! Lakeville, Minnesota, is ready to change the world, apparently.