I was an early SpaceX employee. My equity helped me pay off student loans, buy a home, and make risky career moves.

5 hours ago 6

Gambit founder and early SpaceX employee Josh Giegel is pictured.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Josh Giegel, the 41-year-old cofounder of the AI startup Gambit, who lives in Los Angeles. It's been edited for length and clarity.

I was in grad school at Stanford, finishing my master's and wanting to do a Ph.D.

I had worked at NASA the previous summer, and one of the women I worked with was also a Stanford graduate, and was like: "You're going to be so bored at NASA. Why don't you check out this small space company in Los Angeles called SpaceX?"

I applied and interviewed in the two weeks between flight three and flight four of Falcon 1. I interviewed with Elon; he was still interviewing pretty much everyone at the time. I remember going back to my advisor and saying, "There's nothing I'd rather do on the planet than what he just described."

My Master's ended at the end of 2008, and I began in 2009.

I was on what's called the propulsion analysis team, which was four or five people. Our responsibility was: How do you design the first reusable rocket engine? A very small group of us was responsible for the initial stuff that was on Falcon 9.

I started there when I was 23, and I left when I was 27. It was a little bit of naive immaturity. I knew I wanted to start a company one day, and SpaceX was growing like crazy. I wanted to be on a founding team. I still love the company; I almost went back two or three years later before I ended up starting a company of my own.

The IPO is pretty cool. I'm on a bunch of text threads with guys who were there around the same time, and a couple of them are still there. It's cool to see just how big it became.

When I got there, and they gave the offer, there was an equity component. I remember the HR woman who was going over it with me saying, "We think some day, in 10 or 15 years, this might be worth $250,000-300,000." I distinctly remember her saying, "It might get you a nice down payment on a house in Los Angeles."

We all laugh about it now. But, at the time, the saying was: the fastest way to become a millionaire in space is to start as a billionaire.

Buybacks have been really regular for the last 10 years. Every now and then, we'd take a little bit out. For example, we paid off my wife's student loans a number of years ago. We put down a down payment on a house.

I joke: We did actually get a down payment on a house! She wasn't lying when she said that. It's a house that, on our normal salaries at startups, we wouldn't have been able to afford without that additional windfall.

We also love traveling. We've got a seven-year-old and a one-year-old. We're going to go on slightly more adventurous trips because of it.

My wife is also thinking of doing a larger career change that would come with a decent salary reduction, which she probably wouldn't have been able to do without something like SpaceX.

Professionally, I've always been risky. If the majority of your net worth is tied up in a rocket company, you must be a risk-tolerant individual.

Gambit is a VC-backed company. We've raised about $15 million to date, and there are a couple more investment rounds that are coming. The IPO puts you in a position where folks with a substantial amount of equity could be interested in becoming investors.

At least ten of the people I worked with intimately have started their own company. There was a band that I played in with five SpaceX people; four of us started our own companies. I played guitar.

That whole ecosystem can fund its own endeavors and each other. The quantum of capital that they can put in is not like your typical family and friends round. That's typically $20,000, $50,000, maybe $100,000. Here, that could be on the order of $1 million, maybe $2 million per check.

You also become a bit of a mercenary, asking, "I don't need a paycheck from what I'm going to go do, so what am I going to go do?" It's liberating.

The equity also allows me to take a lower salary at my startup, so that I can go out and hire more people to make my company more successful.