Spacex explodes on landing....again

[y_p_w]

Gone are the days of garage startup when everything is about funding, exiting, stocks, return, etc. You don't see tech with low enough cost and everyone worries about failure with a debt.

When it cost you 100k to get an engineering education and the debt will turn into 150k all said and done, and you have a 2k-3k a month rent to pay, you don't want to take a chance on "passions".

VC and Wall Streets funded projects always look for return within a few years, go big or go home.

Not necessarily with hardware, but there are a lot of software startups that initially operate off of fairly limited budgets outside of salary. Maybe not now, but the area of San Francisco around the ballpark was teeming with people openly talking about their projects.

Chip design is another matter. The cost and complexity of everything is just so high these days. 20-30 years ago, chip startups were pretty common, but now they might be larger ones financed by big semiconductor companies.