Tony Aquila is the CEO of both companies - Canoo and Aquila Family Ventures. I'll never understand why it's okay for CEOs to have multiple concurrent jobs, while one of the biggest fervors of the pandemic was when employees were found to have... multiple concurrent jobs.
Do you manage your own money and finances in addition to having a day-job?
That's what he's doing, albeit in a more complex situation and likely higher wealth bracket given he sold his last company for $Bs. The only thing that strikes me as odd about it is calling oneself "CEO" of the family office. I don't know what title is customary but CEO seems out of place. If it said he was "Chair" of the Aquila Family Ventures family office or something it would stand out far less.
Being a CEO of your family office shouldn't really be a "real job" - it should take up maybe a day or two out of your month if it's being run correctly. To me this would be the same as if a product manager had a side hustle doing some accounting for friends and family. It's fine.
The selling services back and forth thing, I get it, it probably saves some people some work and it might even work out better economically for the company, but the optics are never going to be solid and people are always going to question it, so imo it's not worth it, but... it is quite common.
It’s fine for anyone to have multiple concurrent jobs as long as all their employers know about it. Hiding things is where people get into trouble (and not just with jobs).
This is a totally fair point. The incongruity arises for me in that if I said in a job interview process that I'd be continuing to hold another position while adding this one, I'd get laughed out of the room. If it's critical that rank and file guys don't have divided time or loyalties, why is the standard different for the single person most responsible for success or failure of the company?
The last three jobs I've held, I've had to state up front in writing that I will continue to act as the paid IT support for my spouse's one-person consulting firm. Hasn't been an issue yet.
Three jobs ago I also had a very small side consulting gig that came along after I'd been hired, so I had to get it cleared. It was at the behest of one of their board members though, so it really wasn't a hassle...
Aquila Family Ventures is basically a family office that the CEO likely just oversees but doesn't run day-to-day. It's a different thing than having multiple full-time jobs like Musk.
It's a shell company used to dodge taxes, presumably? Or something similarly nefarious; avoiding liabilities or whatever. Not really a company but a legal instrument.
It's hasn't been a conspiracy theory since the Panama papers came out. Everyone is now aware of the extent rich people go to use tax havens and are rightfully upset. They make record profits, encourage irresponsible consumerism, and don't even pay their fair share for the damage they inflict upon the world.
Furthermore there's a reason rich people flock to places like Delaware, Washington, or California. Those states all have tax schemes that allow the wealthy to pay the least amount of taxes.
Hell us rubes even suffer through coach so that the ultra wealthy's luxury jets are subsidized.
People flock to Delaware because it's the most corporate-friendly state, especially regarding regulations and court cases.
Washington and California are two massive economies, so it's no surprise that rich people flock there.
If this CEO wanted to register a shell company to dodge taxes, he would have done it in better places than Southlake, Texas [1]. Anyone can register an LLC as long as they have valid identification and pay the $300 Texas filing fee...nothing nefarious.
Talking about the Panama Papers will be a long story, but notice how relatively few Americans are on that list. It was mostly people from developing countries with weak rule of law and high levels of corruption...the type where rich folks hide assets to avoid the government or rival business goons coming for it, and it's much easier to cheat taxes in those countries because of weak law enforcement.
There are plenty of consulting/writing/etc. jobs that are explicitly fractional or part-time where someone may have multiple clients. And this is even the case with fractional CFO positions and the like.
Sounds like a hold co. Even startups worth 100K may have the founders hold the stock through a family holding corporation (which may then also be used to "hold" vehicles).
Because CEO's decide which is okay and which isn't, and because fuck you, that's why.
No, it's not logical, or consistent, or rationally defensible. They don't give a shit, and they don't believe they have you answer to you. If they choose to give any answer at all, it will be bullshit in the "On Bullshit" sense of the word; the answer will not be made with any consideration for truth, but just to provide whatever words the speaker thinks will shut you up.
This but unsarcastically. Linux Torvalds, Anders Hejlsberg, and other elite developers also operate under totally different rules than worker bees too.
No, we're not on the same footing as a CEO candidate or 10x developer. Anyone who is sure as heck wouldn't be wasting their life collecting karma points on HN.
I suppose you believe all these billionaires are self-made and that having a handout of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a network of very rich people you know to make investments, made no difference. 'Anyone can succeed through hard work'.
The really rich CEOs collect imaginary karma points on X ...
I started my career alongside a variety of people who are now CEOs, VPs, distinguished engineers, CTOs, etc. and had a chance to observe them as they rose far, far above me. Luck played a factor in their rise, sure, but so did talent and an immense level of drive; their titles are ones they earned.
A lot of bad in our society can be explained by the fact that a lot of people seriously believe that some people are inherently better than others, and deserve to be at the top of the hierarchy, to follow different rules, to get more than one vote, that they are "elite" and should therefore get better treatment. Egalitarianism is not a universally held doctrine.
I thought the downvotes were coming from people who didn't get my sarcasm, but it could also be that HN readers really believe that CEOs are inherently better people...
People aren't inherently better than others, but people are infinitely better at some things than others.
Terrence Tao is inherently better at mathematics than I am, and I'd be a fool to claim otherwise. Torvalds is a much better programmer than I am. There are endless examples.
I'm not saying people aren't better at things than others. The thread was about whether these people deserved special treatment or a different set of rules because of this.
Now if we start arguing if Torvalds "deserves" to be richer than Gates (even though both are quite better than adequate programmers from their time) that's a different story.
But in the end most of it really sounds like sour grapes and complaining.
Interesting. Focus on the quality of the product and more people will want it and pay more for it. Someone should put this case study into a four sentence LinkedIn post so more startup CEOs will want to do it.
I guess people with money want "both sides" reporting for whatever reason but that doesn't seem very appealing to me compared to a well-defined agenda, especially for a newsroom that started with an explicitly abolitionist end. If I wanted to pay a bunch of money just to be confused about my values I would subscribe to virtually any major newspaper.
I understand why you went for a product search engine (gotta monetize) but I think one of the reasons mining reddit for intel is so helpful is you aren't always being sold a product.
For example: I recently turned to reddit because I was looking for a foam roller to resolve some IT band issues from running, and ended up finding a stretching routine that has fixed my problem without buying anything.
Either way, I think this is really cool and bypassing the nonsense that google is becoming is a winning path.
thank you! i completely agree -- i often go to reddit when looking for tv show recommendations because of its honest advice from the community (maybe it's because of its anonymity?)
we definitely want to expand this to outside product search and be more of a general recommendation/opinion search (e.g. in your case, finding out what people are saying about how to fix band issues from running), interested as to what you would think about this :)
besides your anecdote, all the games reviews, computer part reviews, etc are all paid by drop shippers. and some reddits like mattress review ones are exclusively shills talking among them.
I've worked in startups and tech recruiting for startups and whether I was hiring, or hiring on behalf of someone else, I don't think I've ever heard of an entrepreneurial stint as a negative when considering employment history.
Often it's a huge plus as it tells you that the candidate has, at some point, had to think holistically about a business. Doesn't matter if it succeeded or failed so long as you can speak to the experience and the lessons learned.
Love what you're trying to do. I recently moved most of the way off oil-based hydronic baseboard heating in my 1800's New England farmhouse through installing 3 ductless mini-splits with Mitsubishi Hyper Heat condensors. Just to help with your user research, my biggest decision points:
1. Cold weather operation. I get you're saying the units are good down to -15f, but there's nothing like the fact that I can talk to plenty of other people who have good experiences with Hyperheat at -15f to ensure that they'll actually work. Given I'm using these primarily for heat (the AC is a bonus), if they didn't heat well and efficiently at 0f then it was all pointless.
2. Repairability. Again, given I'm trying to use these as my primary heat, I need to know I'll have someone who will service the unit who can be here in a matter of hours. This is why I went away from the DIY route. Most installers around here (semi-rural New England) are super brand aligned and won't service the stuff they don't install.
Would be happy to help with user research if you're looking for folks to talk to.
+1 to servicability. It's hard to get someone who knows how to clean my minisplits. This looks really cool, but I'd need to be confident that I could maintain my units myself.
> if they didn't heat well and efficiently at 0f then it was all pointless.
As long as they heat well (capacity-wise) at those temps, I wouldn't really care if the CoP was 1.5-ish (which it likely will be). You'll still get plenty of 3.5-5.0 CoP time in the (much, much longer) shoulder seasons that getting 3-5 days of sub-2.0 isn't that big of a deal [again, provided the capacity is there].
I've built one of these before and the devil is so very much in the details, but really even more in the context.
There's the easy stuff: "ninja" for example. Nobody, in the year 2023, should be using that word in a job post.
But then there's the hard stuff that really matters. If you want someone who has experience being a "white hat" hacker, that's perfectly alright, but if you want "white people only" well that's obviously bad. If you don't flag the latter you look like a joke, but if you flag every instance of the word "white" then it feels overbearing and like the tool isn't very smart.
I'm pretty sure these will never actually be useful on a superficial word-matching basis. They need to look at broader phrases and context.
And then there's the real problem that even if the tool helps the hiring manager / recruiter sweep their inbuilt biases under the rug to get better applicants, they're still the ones making the hiring decisions.
I can already see the tweets of people making up ridiculous job ads which are perfectly "linted" while contain some wildly racist text. That'd be highly damaging for the tool, which is what OP is saying.
It's like saying you should not need to know about ancient Greece history to participate in marathon running. And the truth is, you don't. You can easily learn the present meaning of a word without fully understanding its etymology.
There are countless words and idioms that will make no sense when you're not familiar with them. You could consider these annoying, or you could consider these the interesting parts of a language.
I for one very much like words with interesting history.
Fair, but marathon doesn't have the additional association of "white = good, black = bad" which is, to say the least, somewhat insensitive given current events.
I'm aware that I'm moving the goalposts a little bit, or at least making them more explicit. Sorry? Just trying to voice explicitly why my (admittedly subjective) stylistic sense is going "Eh, this one is better off replaced by explicit terms".
I mean,one of the core competencies in (certain types of) security is bringing yourself up to speed on obscure technical systems you never heard of before. Familiarizing yourself with unfamiliar terminology is step 1.
If you can't figure out how to google white hat, how are you going to figure out what the FHBTYU (made up acronym) is in your tech stack?
Personally i find the explicit terms really cringy and seem to have been co-opted a bit by marketers. "Ethical hacker" has very different canotations than white-hat, to me.
> You just need to know that white hat is good and black hat is bad.
Yeah, anything that boils down to "you don't need to know about X, you just need to know that white X is good and black X is bad" is not a great look for technical terminology in the current context.
Seriously though, if learning the meaning of two (three if you throw in grey hat) terms is too difficult, never mind the rest of the requisite knowledge to meaningfully participate, you may want to consider an alternate area of study.
I have often wondered though how many coders worldwide are really comparable to a rock star, I guess in terms of standing out as a super creative outlier. So many rockstar wannabes out there in the wild world..
Linus is the only one I can think of given his level of job security. Maybe Woz, but I don't think he doesn't seem to be a professional coder today. Perhaps Stephen Wolfram. Everyone else seems much more disposable than even B-tier rock/pop stars, relatively speaking. Bill doesn't count given he likely hasn't touched any code himself since the 1980s.
I've heard of multiple language and framework designers who failed to score a job when it really should have been a slam dunk. There might be rockstars among the foot soldiers of tech, but virtually none outside of that.
As others have said, unlimited PTO ultimately means that it's up to the manager to determine if you can take days off. This places 100% of the burden on the manager to be the 'bad guy' who has to say no to a request, thus building in an unnecessary opportunity for conflict into that relationship. There's also a burden on the employee making the request to somehow know if they've taken the right amount of vacation.
PTO is one of those things where, to misuse the quote, 'good fences make good neighbors.' A reasonable set of requirements and limits can reduce the guesswork, preserve relationships, and make it so people actually use their PTO.
