The Era of Spite Startups

The same old adjectives come up again and again in conversations with investors about top tech founders: gritty, visionary, creative. I’m hearing a new one lately that speaks to this moment in tech: vengeful. A number of the founders attracting the most investor enthusiasm right now have something in common: They’ve all made messy exits from their previous companies. 

Parker Conrad, fired by investors at insurance startup Zenefits eight years ago, last week announced Rippling, his human resources software firm, he was raising nearly $800 million at a surprisingly rich $13.5 billion valuation. Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder whom Meta Platforms fired, last week helped his seven-year-old defense contractor, Anduril, win a major U.S. Air Force contract. Jony Ive has been raising as much as $1 billion for a mysterious new artificial intelligence device that could (maybe one day) challenge Apple, the company that made him famous before he slowly disappeared from view. Elon Musk, after his falling-out with Sam Altman and OpenAI, got Sequoia Capital to commit to funding his OpenAI competitor, xAI, a story we scooped last week.