[parsimo2010]

Congrats on having a successful mission, it seems quite successful for a first try, and you clearly have some talented people on your team. But I’m going to give you my unsolicited opinion on the writing style.

The writing style sounds more like a tech bro describing some weekend conquest, and is wholly unappealing to most of the space industry (or at least the ones with decision making authority). Your CMGs were “locked in,” several times you “nailed it,” and so on.

You might have a business strategy that I’m not aware of but I’d expect that most of your market is controlled by aging men in suits, and they don’t talk like this. Most startups and tech bros aren’t spending money on space. It’s big established corporations that can fund this kind of stuff. Write like them. You can talk like a tech bro and get seed funding, but if you want to get to a sustainable business you have to talk corporate.

I would hate for your company to get passed over for lucrative opportunities because your public image seems immature. I looked at your website and you have a bunch of ex-government people on your senior advisory board. Get their opinion on your writing. It sounds silly, but you significantly lower your probability of winning contracts if people see you as a team of “bros.” People don’t want to spend millions on guys who are “locked in.” People want to spend millions on people who do professional engineering and risk reduction and clearly communicate how professional and competent they are.

I ranted way too long about your writing style. It’s pretty cool that you were able to design your own bus and most of it worked.

[Morromist]

I agree. If it wasn't written with an AI I would be shocked. Its got the classic "VLEO isn’t just a better orbit for imaging — it’s the next productive orbital layer." mdash and all. That style sends strong signals of lazyness, scammyness and unprofessionalism.

Why would I take a company seriously when they can't be bothered to write their own press statements and blog posts?

[zipy124]

Yeh, it's an interesting project but the AI writing style was exhausting to read, and didn't fill me with confidence in the company.

[shrx]

The whole thing gave off a feeling that the author was desperate to prove something.

[notahacker]

> most of your market is controlled by aging men in suits

that um... doesn't sound like the space market. The engineers involved won't care about whether it's big corporate speak or GPT-ish gushing about "nailing it", they'll just want to understand if its a suitable bus for their mission concept and how well it works. It's actually more candid than your average blog in that respect.

[parsimo2010]

It’s not the engineers who have the money or the control of company decisions. The engineers might make recommendations to their PMs and director of whatever program, but when considered against the myriad other bus options in LEO, the decision makers might be scared off by this writing and choose a less risky bus and accept the worse imaging performance or performance degradation in whatever other payload they integrate.

[notahacker]

Bus options are a lot thinner in VLEO, and I don't think even decision makers purchasing something utterly generic are scanning company blogs looking for excessive use of slang and GPT sentence patterns as a reason to veto technical decisions. We're talking about an industry in which executives generally are engineers and often love flaunting their nerdiness and the most successful player is also the world's biggest social media troll. The US defense lexicon they'll have to master to bid on that type of contract is way more cringeworthy than bro-speak anyway...

[Aurornis]

> The writing style sounds more like a tech bro describing some weekend conquest, and is wholly unappealing to most of the space industry (or at least the ones with decision making authority). Your CMGs were “locked in,” several times you “nailed it,” and so on.

This is on the company blog. It ends with a call to action to either subscribe to their mailing list or explore their careers page.

It has the right tone for the goal. Tone policing isn’t helpful. The authors are even here answering questions which is very nice of them.

[parsimo2010]

> Tone policing isn’t helpful.

Yes it is, these are YC alums. A significant portion of that program is learning how to pitch to investors. Are you saying that YC wastes this effort? The goal of this post might be to recruit engineers to hire, but it is public facing and part of their image that anyone might read, including future customers. It doesn’t help to recruit good engineers but be unable to sell because the industry expects strict professionalism.

[metalman]

it looks like Toppher Haddad has two writing styles, the tech bro blog , and the style he used above to discuss the technical aspects of there optical technolgy, and that is high geek, high uber geek of the type generaly associated with an inability to comprehend others lack of incomprehension, so actualy an unusual integration of skills and aproaches