I’m the founder of Life360. We have a 100m users by exploiting exactly this. Our app is designed specifically for your close family group vs Apple which has a single user focus.
It’s very hard to do both things well and at Apple scale it’s nearly impossible.
This is what enabled us to win despite FindMy being launched a few years after us.
As a shameless plug I’m building a family AI team as a startup within our larger 600 person org.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.
Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail.
The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.
My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.
I’m the cofounder of Life360, a company I’ve grown from seed to IPO, now with about 600 employees. This whole issue can be addressed by embracing a straightforward social contract, something I share openly with everyone I hire:
No promises of lifetime employment. I’m focused on the long-term health of the company, and our needs will inevitably change. If we continue to grow, it’s almost guaranteed that not everyone will be the right fit at every stage.
No expectation of loyalty. The flip side is that we aim to attract ambitious, hungry people, which means we need to provide real opportunities for career advancement. If we can’t, I understand you’ll move on.
If we let someone go after a single bad quarter, that’s on us for being shortsighted. We know people have ups and downs, and we don’t want to be overly sentimental, but we also don’t want to act rashly. On the other hand, if someone’s job-hopping every year, that’s usually a sign of short-term thinking. From 2014–2021, job-hopping didn’t matter much. Now, it’s becoming clear that those signals are important again.
At the end of the day, it’s not about judgment—no good/bad or right/wrong here (aside from obvious dealbreakers like dishonesty). It’s just adults making tradeoffs.
That said, I’ve seen how some companies shy away from being upfront about this, which leads to cynicism. We’ve had moments like that too—at some point, we started calling ourselves “a family.” I shut that down fast. It wasn’t popular, but it helped clarify our stance. You know what you’re signing up for with us.
It’s very hard to do both things well and at Apple scale it’s nearly impossible.
This is what enabled us to win despite FindMy being launched a few years after us.
As a shameless plug I’m building a family AI team as a startup within our larger 600 person org.
https://chrishulls.medium.com/life360-is-building-a-family-a...