> And in the aftermath, a much healthier ecosystem may emerge [...]
Seems to have missed the lesson of its immediately previous paragraph:
> The 1980s were dominated by junk bond specialists, the nineties by investment bankers, the aughts by hedge fund mangers.
Nothing was learned about the 80s, or the 90s, or the 00s (or or or ad infinitum). The parasites merely adapted to the changing environment and found new host expressions.
Probably even fewer than the small % you think. In my experience most of them have adopted a philosophy that promotes the behavior. Think on the simplistic lines of "if not me, then somebody else will do it", "without me the technology/etc. Would never exist", or my favorite variant: the true believer.
It feels like the natural extension of libertarian ideas. "If everyone looks out for themselves, everyone will be looked after" precludes actual reflection, since if something is successful and is not made illegal it's everyone elses problem for not doing the same thing.
Libertarianism is a political movement whereas you seem to be referring to ethics (since you explicitly reference things which are not illegal). Most ethical systems wouldn’t support this type of behavior though.
Those of us building technology are not immune, either.
How much have, for example, social media companies ruined lives? It has certainly helped many people, but at this point in history, on a daily basis, how many people are hurt more than they’re helped?
I would guess that positives and negatives are overstated in both directions. New technology is always “ruining lives” according to the previous generation. Probably when we invented writing it was considered exceedingly dangerous.
“Evidence for the relationship between Instagram use and well-being, as indicated by ratings of life satisfaction and happiness, is limited and mixed.”
“Initial evidence suggests that Instagram membership does not seem to be linked to depressive symptoms.”
“Evidence for the association between Instagram use and anxiety is scarce. The majority of the studies suggests that Instagram membership does not seem to put one at-risk for experiencing elevated anxiety levels.”
My interpretation is that social media matters far less than we think. If it was truly so bad (or good!) we would have found stronger evidence in the data.
You mean the kind of people that fight the same holy wars every 5 years because the industry is allergic to taking cues from people with actual experience?
There's bad apples across the experience spectrum. I'll take the young kids rediscovering relational databases for the Nth time rather than the dinosaurs that keep us enslaved to C-like languages and ancient practices. For goodness' sake it took well over 4 decades for proper algebraic data types to start appearing in everyday languages! Is it too much to ask to get to use dependent types in a routine setting before I drop dead?
Your display of form-over-function language pedantry is a brilliant example of one of the more obnoxious wastes of time and energy that plague the industry
This era is absolutely dominated by the tech worker class.
The people my age who became tech workers (like me) would have become IBs in the 2000s, lawyers in the 90s, or relationship bankers in the 80s.
Look at how many people my age with money completely gentrified NoMA in DC, Park Slopes in Brooklyn, large tracts of Mission in SF, priced out Gays from the Leather District in SF, CapHill in Seattle, made Austin uncool, etc.
Somehow I don’t think the people who learned to code wanting to make games or fix problems, or because they just love it, would have become o vestment bankers. There’s certainly a group who went for the money but there’s also a large number of make the money doing something they love.
It is not when it shows how people in Tech have a level of undue capital influence in America in the 2020s. This isn't the 1980s-1990s anymore (which was 30-40 years ago at this point) when nerds would be bullied for playing D&D or put in lockers.
Society has changed, and software engineering is viewed as the goto high paying job for people in my age demographic. And to be honest it makes sense - you make six figures, almost never go into the office, have the ability to travel all over the world working remotely, low working hours, intellectually stimulating work, etc.
And it's my cohort that plays a role in buying property and making everything expensive.
The archetype of programmer you mention still exists (hell, I don't program for a living anymore but I still mess around with kernel programming and OS dev) but are very much the minority now. Majoring in CS and CE is a fast track way to become a member of the 10% in American society so EVERYONE is trying to major in it.
I find solace in the fact that most of these people will not "succeed"(by that I mean becoming respectable, competent engineers who will have good opportunities readily available to them). CS is hard; quite a large chunk of these sorts of people who enroll in bootcamps or try to major in CS end up dropping out or not pursuing a CS related job. Who knew that being genuinely interested in a subject helps in becoming good at it too.
Ehn maybe. I know some legitimately brilliant engineers who absolutely fucking hate code and once they grind up to staff, will nope to Engineering Management or Product Management.
I liked code but at some point, I got pissed off at ego driven "10x" engineers who couldn't be bother to explain in a non-combative manner how they architected their code base even though I was directly impacted by it. I realized weilding the mallet of "Profit and Loss responsibility" could get the assholes to shut up and let the rest of the engineers get unblocked.
> Society has changed, and software engineering is viewed as the goto high paying job for people in my age demographic.
This explains the influx of grifters and “MBA” types into the software industry along with the focus of software onto marketing junk, psychological manipulation, invasive ai, scammy digital coins, and scraping up people’s private data.
As someone who got into coding for the fun of it as a nerdy kid in the 90’s – now that the money is there, I’m not gonna not follow it. If I can have fun for 50k or for 200k+, I’ll take the 200k option thanks.
It's SWEs as well. Leetcode grinding isn't hard if you have an Applied Math background, like a large portion of IBankers. Ironically, I don't meet many ex-IBs as a PM.
Edit with additional anecdote:
A friend of mine who works IB told me how most of SF's Goldman Sachs Analysts (new grad IBs) class in 2020 and 2021 left for tech (either PM or SWE) because you earn more as a new grad FAANG dev than as an IB Analyst ($90k base and variable bonus that ended up pushing TC to around $150-160k with 60-70 hours of work).
In the past year, Google announced both a 70 billion dollar stock buyback program and the layoff of 12,000 workers. This would not happen in an era where workers have a seat at the table, let alone an era where workers dominate the industry.
I think HN User Alephnerd's material point is that, to society, submitting to the tyranny of tech workers can feel just as bad as submitting to the tyranny of the capital élites. Probably a lot of non tech people in society would prefer submitting to the capital élites to submitting to the tech workers. I mean just from a numbers perspective, there are fewer of them. So if every person who has power becomes a douchebag sooner or later? Then, and I'm just thinking out loud here, but you probably want as few of them as possible.
Just trying to view things from the perspective of the, sort of, non tech, non "HN user" person out in flyover country.
100% this. And it's happening among my generation. There's a reason why words like "Tech Bro" are common parlance now.
Also, us techies have 100% become the capital elite now. We all work jobs that can afford us a full 401k contribution yearly plus the ability until a couple months ago to pull massive FHA loans at near 0% to buy a house.
New grad SWE positions are paying around 100-110k a year for around 20-30hrs/week of work, while new grad accounting, nursing, IB, govt work (GS-7), teaching, and other "middle class jobs" are pulling in 60-90k a year for 40-60 hours a week of work. There is an EXTREME amount of resentment against Techies for that reason. We all love to bitch and moan about our gilded cage, but at the end of the day, our lives are fucking amazing compared to the rest of Americans.
Being in the top 5% doesn't necessarily make you adjacent to the rest of society.
> New grad SWE positions are paying around 100-110k a year for around 20-30hrs/week of work
This was true 20 years ago during dot com boom, so not much has improved. Select FAANG workers over the past decade living in San Fran are making the big salaries, but the cost and quality of living is a huge tradeoff.
In SF, new grad SWE roles (non-FAANG) pay $130-140k base with TC reaching $200k with only 20-30 hours of work a week, which is massive compared to other white collar roles in SF (IB Analyst Base+TC comes to 150-160k w/ 90k base, starting level Biotech roles pay $80-90k, new grad accounting pays $90k, SF city employees earn $70-80k starting). Techies still trounce the rest of the city's earning power. I'm one of them.
Tech salaries trounced everyone else 20 years ago too. The $100k was not abnormal for grads in cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Raleigh-Durham 20 years ago when houses could be had $150k. Things aren’t that great these days in comparison.
Interesting. I didn't realize new grad salaries in the dot com boom broke 6 figures. I would have assumed $70-90k base with maybe a 10% bonus plus equity. Or is that $100k total comp, not base salary?
I’m pretty old and got into this line of work because I loved it and expected to earn a decent living but nothing more. I am embarrassed by what we in this industry get paid versus other professions. This industry dominates others in terms of capital and influence and is itself dominated by what you call the tech “working class”
Sounds pretty bad to me given tech stack most companies have adopted so far. CTO or technical leads are pretty much incompetent. We seem to give up engineering metrics to "hiring pool" or hype or fad or big guys do it or whatever non-sense-ish.
Nothing in this article describes the additional layer of anti-startup thinking: the idea you the employee can make a ton of money off of the equity issued to you is slowly being less and less true. Your equity is diluted, deferred, or otherwise rendered functionally worthless such that it’s no longer worth joining an early startup with a compensation package involving equity. More and more employees just demand cash.
I think employees treat startups more and more like a jumping pad to get to their ultimate goal of work for Fang. There's no point staying at startups when working at a big tech will yield more money in the long term. I don't blame them though. Look at how startups are run nowadays, all the potential upside has been sucked dry by VCs.
That’s true for some people but not everybody. I like little companies and am willing to take less salary for the enjoyment of building the product from the beginning, knowing every single person you work with, and playing different roles in the team.
I have worked for mega-companies via acqui-hire and I feel like my preference is based in solid experience. I’ve never hired into a company with more than 30 employees in my 30+ years as a developer and probably never will. My current gig is now grown well into the size range where I frequently am reminded why I don’t like bigger companies :(
I used to 100% agree with this, but now I realize that smaller companies have different issues that can make the experience as bad as larger ones, and you gotta learn to compartmentalize the same way.
In the end this is just a job, and we should focus on what's best for ourselves. This is possible and necessary with both large and small employers.
Big companies build new things all the time. And you can easily join a startup which is several years old and has massive tech debt that you are stuck cleaning up. So I don’t think wanting to build new stuff from the ground up necessarily means a startup is best.
Knowing everyone you work with is certainly nice. At big companies you usually work as part of a team of, say, 8-12. And depending on your role and level you might rarely interact with others. At a startup you might have to talk to customers or other partner companies. So I wouldn’t even say it’s universally better in that way.
I do think a big benefit of startups is it’s much easier to get a sense of ownership for what you are doing which generally leads to more job satisfaction. Feeling like a mere cog can be demoralizing.
> So I don’t think wanting to build new stuff from the ground up necessarily means a startup is best.
This is true, but why the focus on building new things? Improving and utilizing existing code bases is where most of the value from a software developer can be gained.
I work at a startup and I make enough that my fiance could quit his shitty job and pursue whatever he wants. Our bills are taken care of, and we both have the freedom to do whatever makes us happy.
For me, I take joy from my work. I get to build something new and cool, and I work with a bunch of fun people.
We have enough money, and sometimes enough is enough. I could earn much more at another company, but why? What would I do with the excess money? Buy more shit I won't use? I earn enough money to support my family and I get it from a job I find personally satisfying. More money won't make me any happier, and will just cause more problems. No thanks.
Trying to maximize my salary at all costs just so "number go up" seems incredibly unhealthy and shortsighted. I'd rather be happy and fulfilled.
>Trying to maximize my salary at all costs just so "number go up" seems incredibly unhealthy and shortsighted. I'd rather be happy and fulfilled.
Sounds like you have an exit plan already worked out? You sound like you have a good retirement saved up or something else working to keep you free of worry.
For the majority of ppl working in this world, they don't have any options which is also accompanied by debt, and the future is always uncertain unless progress is upwards, and most of the time there is a ceiling to potential... There's often no healthy choices for people who didn't have the ability to save up.
My reason for wanting more money is as insurance. Who knows if the future will be as favourable to our industry. Perhaps software will go into a giant slump and salaries will plummet closer to the median. Or perhaps I’ll have personal medical issues that make it difficult to continue working. Or there could be unforeseen personal expenses (kids, family emergency, I or my partner wants to quit working or change careers). Or any other things that I can’t even imagine. The “unknown unknowns” as they say.
So I make around 3x what I actually need to but save the rest. I expect to have enough to “retire” in a few years and then I’ll be able to pick jobs purely based on interest and fun and not pay. For me that’s worthwhile.
Same here. Due to demographic changes, I am predicting services and products I need in old age will be increasing in price at much quicker rates than in the past.
For me, personally, my goal is not just to maximize lifetime income. It's much more important to me to have a workplace with good collaborators and meaningful work where I feel like I am contributing something unique and valuable. I have tried to follow that throughout my career (not that I haven't ended up in some bad workplaces from time to time!) and overall I have no complaints with where I am financially. If you told me you would double my salary to work for Amazon I would say no without hesitation.
This is pretty overblown, I think. I have with intention avoided working for very large companies for most of my career and have a nice house in a major urban area. I save plenty of money and am reasonably likely to retire (defined as "do work I want to, when I want to, for play money etc.") before I'm 55.
If $200K/year at senior/principal isn't "sustainable"--well, move out of the SFBA, I guess.
Not everyone has the flexibility to move wherever they want. I have family obligations in SFBA so I’m kind of stuck. Not that it’s super bad but I dream of saving 2x as much by moving somewhere cheaper.
That's the thing, though. Everyone knows equity value has decreased and salaries have generally increased to reflect it. Within some error bars, $200K is a pretty representative one amongst folks I know who are working for startups in a senior/principal role.
There was much more of a delta when I started doing this ~10 years ago, but even then few people were in a hard spot (again, SFBA types maybe excluded, get another two roommates I guess).
I worked 15+ years in small companies (not necessarily startups) and always made above median salary for the age. Certainly not having as lavish a lifestyle as I could if money were my first priority in life, but sustainability has never been an issue at all.
This is in my opinion the biggest luxury of working in tech over a lot of other occupations, being able to fairly comfortably value other things over salary and not having to take whatever job that pays a little more.
I think hardly anyone in any job is fully maximizing their income. I’ve heard friends say the same thing as you about their $20/hr jobs. Like they could switch and get $25 but they are comfortable and able to live on it so why bother.
Yeah, that's something I noticed as well. Smaller companies have become a mere rite of passage. I now see a lot of young candidates intending to only stay one or two years on a small startup to get experience before quitting, some of them confiding that right after signing the contract. And older developers historically already prefer jumping ship rather than negotiating salaries or facing situations they can't win.
slowly? It’s ever been thus except in very rare anomalous situations.
My default position has been that equity is monopoly money, and it’s been that position since the Simpsons mocked the dot com crash. “Oh, Bart: it’s not about how much stock you have, it’s about how much copper wire you can rip out of the wall before they catch you!”
I don't know if it's slowly happening--seems to have always been the case as far as I can tell. Unless you're founder level or a single-digit employee number, it's remarkably rare to make bank from a startup equity package. I consider them to be a shoebox full of scratch-off lottery tickets, and kindly ask for as much cash as possible, keeping the shoebox in the closet.
Don’t do this. No matter what specific terms you get, lawyers with much more experience in this game than you will write their way around it. Cash is the only way which can’t be circumvented.
lawyers with much more experience in this game than you
So what you're saying, is the next lawyer in the chain, can always fool the prior?
If that is the case, then is an employment contract not the same? Suddenly, your contract now has you working for minimum wage?
Because 'next lawyer in chain' can always destroy all prior contracts?
So it is all pointless? Or are these lawyers only able to negate all equity claims?
Thus, the founders always get nothing? Or is it the VCs which get their equity diluted to 0, all the time, because no one can make a solid equity contract?
Note: if this happened to you, more info may aid us all.
If they lower your wage you will notice immediately. Also, the games they can play with wages are more limited due to tight regulation. One of the “features” of equity is lower regulation.
The way to look at it is that the person with majority ownership writes the rules unless there is regulation around it. The VC's own more of the company, are issuing new shares. As an employee, you won't be in that situation. VC's are more protected because of their ownership and decision making power (in the sense of controlling most of the shares and board and ceo), not just because they have some shares.
> ”Most of us,” she said, “are just making something slightly better than what already exists.”
It occurred to me yesterday that Flyer (1903) to Viking (1976) was only ~7 decades, and we're currently at Eniac (1945) + 78.
That said, I think the aerospace people had a far, far better grasp of the underlying principles of their domains than we do of ours, so there's still hope for major advances in software.
(OTOH, judging by his published output, Luca Cardelli believes he had Von Neumann programming all figured out by the turn of the century — so that hope may be slim)
While interesting to compare, I think ultimately progress can never be reflected to maintain some particular level. I think a better picture is that given some initial state X, and a new discovery D, there is another state Y that we can reach in some amount of time T by exploring all consequences of that discovery in the context of X. If no new discoveries arise before we reach state Y, progress will essentially halt entirely, until some random process happens to produce a new discovery.
I believe we are now getting closer to finishing the exploration of a series of extraordinary discoveries that happened in the 1900s-1940s or so, and have so far been unlucky in making any completely new discovery, so our rate of progress as we get near to a state Y is slowing down.
I actually think we’ve done pretty well considering there are physical limits.
Space we’ve obviously done really well. But even in commercial aviation we have planes carrying more passengers that use less fuel, less crew, and have far better safety records than 1976. And tickets are much cheaper as well.
> Instead of solely focusing on revenue – something many founders did because financing rounds or exits are based on a multiple of sales – Jane emphasized keeping customer churn low.
This is a weird thing to write, because keeping custom churn low is one of the key points of increasing revenue.
Startups don’t really choose one or the other. They need both. I think the author may have been in such a rush to sort startups into “good” and “bad” examples that they bought into one startup’s positive spin on their own constrained growth.
I do agree with the general point that a return to focus on sustainable business is good for the industry. The easy money of the past several years has produced some weird distortions in the industry. I’ve been involved with startups where shipping product seemed like it was the lowest priority. They were so busy hiring credentialed managers and building out elaborate org charts and planning unnecessarily complicated off-sites and events. It felt like the infinite funding created an environment where they felt financially successful despite barely having customers yet, and they turned themselves into big company excess because that was the cargo cult thing to do.
In practice I do not think you are correct. I don’t want to name names, but revenue and growth over churn was one of the explicit directions of a startup I worked at. I agree with you that churn is important, but don’t think that’s a rule that all managers follow.
> “I got this wrong and I take responsibility for that,”
This has always bugged me. Yes I get it you don’t want to put it in some passive-voiced “mistakes were made” kind of thing. But what does it mean to “take responsibility” if there are no consequences?
It would be meaningful if the “take responsibility” statement was followed up with “and I’m submitting my resignation effective immediately.” But “I take full responsibility… and y’all are fired” is just a way to get the good feels of “owning it” without actually owning it.
"I take responsibility" is a coded way of saying "the discussion is over".
This is a very old management trick to avoid further arguments and discussion. You wanna avoid telling someone they're incompetent? Just say "it was my mistake to have hired you, we weren't ready to have someone in your position". You wanna rescind a job offer because you got cold feet? Just say "our HR made a mistake, and this offer shouldn't have been made". It also means you're not willing to work together to solve the problem.
The reason for those mass-layoffs are not "mistakes" by founders, and they're happening at the same time for a specific reason: to put employees collectively at a disadvantage in terms of salary and negotiations. They successfully shifted the discussion from this to "Why are they taking responsibility without any consequence?".
I interpret the term as "I have to have a lot of inconvenient conversations with the board and large shareholders about this".
> The reason for those mass-layoffs are not "mistakes" by founders, and they're happening at the same time for a specific reason: to put employees collectively at a disadvantage in terms of salary and negotiations.
See, I think they're all happening at the same time because these companies are publicly traded, so executives are primarily concerned about shoring up the stock price ahead of an expected recession.
There’s plenty of mismanagement and failing up that goes on at the expense of the workers, but the rationale is like this:
In the general case, from the company perspective, the layoffs have to happen to keep the company healthy. Regardless why it has reached this point.
When it comes to the CEO, they are admitting fault to the board, but the board is choosing to retain them, perhaps feeling the incumbent CEO may be best situated to right the company.
My assumption is that the consequences come when it happens a second time and the board says “enough, you’re finished”
This is a good summary. We don’t fire workers just because they made a mistake. It’s not even really a moral stance, it’s that turnover has overhead and risks that have to be justified, and those are particularly for a CEO.
It might feel like vindication for a CEO to be fired due to the necessity of layoffs, but on the other hand a CEO who did not overhire to maximize growth in the boom times could just as likely be fired by the board for failure to capitalize on the bull market.
We don't fire workers just because they made a mistake. But we also don't offer those workers $20,000,000 compensation packages because company performance hinges so critically on incentivizing these rare few individuals who are capable of... coasting with the tide along with everyone else?
Not sure where coasting comes in. Hiring during the boom and laying off during the downturn may be exactly what shareholders want. It's up to the board to decide how the CEO is performing. This is incredibly hard to evaluate, but it's clear that CEO choice matters, thus the market rate has ticked up for CEO salaries.
We may find it morally abhorrent, but it's important to understand what's going on. The business world does not start from the axiom that layoffs are always the result of management failure.
No, it's just a platitude. The true assessment is not a binary proposition though, and it's not going to come out directly in a memo or PR, you have to read between the lines a bit. Consider the difference between John Foley and Andy Jassy's performance.
The cliche response to that is "why would you want to let someone go in the moment that he's learned this valuable lesson?". The "learnings" they discuss in their "retro" are always very specific, they're never that "you suck as a CEO and shouldn't lead a company because you have no clue what you're doing".
I did not read the entire article but the first couple of paragraphs are a good take on what, I think, is called "Start-up porn". I am tired of listening how good Jobs is and only some mentioning what Wozniak did for Apple (Personal computing in general). Engineers deserve equal respect as so-called "Founders". At least I believe so. Please let us be worthy of recognizing the hard work of people.
This article misses the mark. Shopify etc. are not stupid companies. During the good times, it made sense to take cheap money and expand headcount. Growing fast when the growth is available is a good idea. During a downturn, you make layoffs. Big deal. That’s how it works.
I kind of agree but on the other hand it’s not so simple. Layoffs aren’t instant and their negative effects on morale and employee work can last a long time. It can also be hard to identify the right people to lay off so companies are likely to make the wrong choice in many cases.
So on one hand yes it makes sense to splurge when money is cheap and then cut back when it isn’t, on the other you may cause long term damage to your business doing this too much. I think tech companies probably overdid it the past few years.
I agree. There is a qualitative cost to this grow/contract strategy. And I’m not sure companies are able to recognize or react to it because it can’t be measured easily.
They're stupid because the pivot to profitability has failed for many of these companies. We were assured for years they could turn a tap and start the spigot of cash flow. Unfortunately that seems to be rare indeed as the very things needed to drive revenues (increasing prices, advertising) drive away those users who were attracted to cheap venture-subsidized products.
Well, in markets where there's only space for 1, 2, or 3 companies to succeed, then it makes sense to be rewarded for quick growth, so that you can end up in one of the 1-3 "winning" slots instead of going out of business.
The incentive isn't something artificial, it's just how certain markets work. E.g. a city might be able to support hundreds of pizzerias, but only 2-3 ride hailing companies.
Well, nine women can't deliver a baby in one month, but nine women can definitely drive nine riders where they need to go at the same time.
The mythical man-month is about how adding individual new members to an existing software team doesn't necessarily make the team deliver faster (and can even slow them down). Nowhere does it claim that adding more parallel projects or growth initiatives to a company slows the company down.
>..the incentives of a managerial class are not the same as the incentives of the lone entrepreneur. They have different timelines, risk profiles, and diversification/skin in the game. The managerial class is often motivated by a huge salary, so they’re more likely to play it safe to preserve their job. Even if the companies fail, they’ll get extremely rich. They’re just trying to hang on for as long as they can. Owners however are often motivated by their equity, so they’re more likely to think in the long-term interests of the company.
I think founders thought about the long term when companies were growing slowly by earning money and then reinvesting it. At least in SV with the amounts of available investor money they are incentivized to make a company look good for a few years and then cash out enormous amounts of money. There doesn’t seem to be long term thinking of the company as a sustainable business.
Twice now I’ve watched up close as founders mismanaged companies into oblivion while chasing Silicon Valley clout. Those companies crashed and burned while the founders still got rich. That quote might apply to normal entrepreneurs, but not to the VC funded nonsense we see now.
Seems logical, also doesn't reflect reality in my experience. Founders want to piss off an incumbent enough to be bought or IPO. Founders also seek social reward. Once you're in the one percent, your motivations are completely detached from the rest of us. You're encouraged to consider yourself as a wunderkind playing high stakes poker in order to raise money, as this is the only real signal investors latch onto.
Disruption itself is a game of usurper; not one of business fundamentals.
The agents still act "rationally" (in their own best interests, supposedly), but those interests are defined differently than suggested.
Plenty of founders go public early and raise large capital. Biotech, energy firms, and electric car companies recently. Tech startups are pretty unique in that they need huge amounts of capital from private markets for a long time. It requires a higher risk-reward story to be told leading to moonshots.
Tech companies actually need much less capital to scale than other industries. Which is why VC focuses on software, and why tech founders are so much richer than founders in other industries.
The problem is that once the VC industry reached its peak, the capital itself became a competitive weapon. If startup 1 only really needs $10 million in capital to reach profitability, the VCs can't make that much money off of it. So they will fund startup 2 with $100 million over several rounds, and almost certainly knock startup 1 out of the market just by scaling faster. That means startup 1 essentially has to raise and burn massive amounts to grow as rapidly as possible, even if they would prefer to go with the $10 million to profitability plan that would be considered the only sane route in any other industry. And it leads to the almost unbelievable to anyone in finance outside of VC situation of investors being pissed that a company isn't burning cash fast enough.
Founder worship is a straightforward evolution of a general US/protestant (See Max Weber) worship of rich people.
It's here to stay because that permeates US culture completely.
Most don't even notice it.
I do because I was raised in a roman-catholic country rich people are not supposed to be worshipped - straightforward interpretation of the Bible.
On the other hand when I read stories of Elon Musk the real-life Tony Spark whose by the sheer force of its genius brain is going to save Humanity by making it multi-galactic, that does remind me of the hagiographies I had to read when I was young - those unbelievable but nonetheless believed biographies of the saints of the catholic pantheon.
That's an interesting point. I'm from Germany and we definitely have founder worship here (but we have fewer founders, and these days a lot of the 'startups' are just projects by students looking for state subsidies, not private money) but we also have a lot of protestants. Is it not the same in Spain or Italy?
Max Weber's "Protestant Ethic" did not refer to the teaching of Luther that are mainstream in Germany but specifically to the Calvinists and Pietists that brought their value to the US.
When he discussed it in the Protestant Ethic, he used Lutheranism as the chief example of the unio mystica that contrasted sharply with the ascetic posture. Later he would associate "Luther, the symbolic exponent of bureaucratic despotism, with the ascetic hostility to Eros — an example of Weber's sporadic tendency to link together bureaucratic and ascetic modes of life and to oppose both from mystical and aristocratic perspectives."
However, Weber saw the fulfillment of the Protestant ethic not in Lutheranism, which was too concerned with the reception of divine spirit in the soul, but in Calvinistic forms of Christianity.[6]: 32–33 The trend was carried further still in Pietism.
The US definitely has always had a strong Calvinist bent to it and there's been discussion of the increasing influence of Calvinist thought amongst Evangelism in recent times - see "creeping Calvinism" as it's been called:
Interesting, thank you for pointing out that it wasn't necessarily about protestants in general.
Which does beg the question though: given that Germany isn't Calvinist, and we still have founder worship, is Calvinism really the reason founders are worshiped in the US?
> Founder worship is a straightforward evolution of a general US/protestant (See Max Weber) worship of rich people. It's here to stay because that permeates US culture completely. Most don't even notice it.
Conversely complaints about founder worship typically drip with ressentiment. It's funny how all of this anchors back to Nietzsche's expansive take on the influence of Christianity in Western culture.
I don’t think it’s about worshipping rich people as it is about worshipping success. The money is just a result of being successful. They are willing to look past the survivorship bias because let’s face it working for someone else always feels second class to doing something “on your own” (air quotes btw).
People look to the survivors and see that it paid off in the end. They don’t need to bow down to no one and they’re able to exit the hamster wheel.
Case in point I know of someone who sold their small company for like 20 million dollars. Peanuts compared to billion dollar exits but gargantuan for most regular people. This dude was apparently some regular dude who sold the company in his 40s and he basically quit and focuses full time on his family. No longer needs to work 40 plus hours a week nor play office politics. He’s set and so is his family.
In support of your point, the worship is mostly directed at people who made money themselves. Maybe a small inheritance helped bootstrap them, but they have clearly accomplished something.
By contrast, can you even name the heirs of the Rockefeller fortune?
> worshipping success... The money is just a result of being successful.
Except this still defines 'success' as "making a lot of money". If making money is a result of being successful, then if someone doesn't make a lot of money, can they be considered successful, and how? I challenge you to name three contemporary people worshipped as successful but aren't considered successful in terms of their net worth.
Side note: A $20 million payoff is still rich and absolutely out of reach for most. A person working full-time at $15/hr could work for 600 years and still be $2 million short of $20 million.
of course I can. There are way too many researchers and scientists to list who I consider successful who aren’t multi millionaires. They are successful in a different context.
The discussion was about worshipping startup founders and success was in that context. My point is that people like us (tech workers, assuming u might be one too) look up more to escaping the hamster wheel of promotion driven development and other bullshit in favor of just living life. Startups are a capitalist game. You don’t need to play it, you’re free to do something else.
I specifically said "worshipped as successful" to require not just personal opinion. I mean worshipped in the same way as Jobs, Gates, Musk, Bezos, or even entertainers like Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Lady Gaga, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and so on, are worshipped.
Isn’t that subjective too? I don’t worship Bezos but I like Bill Gates and Elon. Like I said you’re comparing apples to oranges there’s no comparison between Elon and Oprah and Lady Gaga besides “they have a lot of followers and money”. How they did it is different and only Elon would be in the startup context.
I mean Steven Hawking, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Higgs, Tim Berners Lee, etc are all “worshipped as successful” by many people since they’re popular and well known. In my circle of casual science fans (we aren't scientists) we worship these people because we like science.
Success leads to money. Unless you’re in a commie country where it might lead to gulag lol.
If someone doesn't make money, they aren't successful? That's how I read it. Which leaves open the question, are there three people who didn't make money yet who are broadly considered successful enough to attract worshippers from among the general population? If so, what makes them successful, if not net worth?
No I was saying that at least in capitalist western countries like the USA usually if you’re good at something and successful at it, the result is a lot of money.
I’m a software engineer and I’d say I’m pretty good considering I always rank in the top 10%, so it makes sense to me that I’m paid a lot of money.
I’m starting a company and I plan on doing my best to succeed on it. If I do, my success will lead to money.
What I’m trying to say (esl so it’s hard for me maybe to convey) is that money is a side effect of being successful aka being good at something.
> I don’t think it’s about worshipping rich people as it is about worshipping success.
That's an issue too, because "success" increasingly looks dependent on timing more than anything else. Your company could be a money-burning endeavour and you could still come out rich if you impress the right VCs and time your IPO.
Jack Dorsey and Evan Spiegel are billionaires, yet their companies lose hundreds of millions pretty much every single year. Same for Shopify, Uber and many other "unicorns".
> Case in point I know of someone who sold their small company for like 20 million dollars. Peanuts compared to billion dollar exits but gargantuan for most regular people. This dude was apparently some regular dude who sold the company in his 40s and he basically quit and focuses full time on his family. No longer needs to work 40 plus hours a week nor play office politics. He’s set and so is his family.
Good for him, but he’s still no god. I’m not worshiping any man.
Silicon Valley - and the tech industry in general - have always operated on optimism and hype.
And while I understand the point that the author of this article is trying to make, I don't think that there will be any significant value reset (of any kind) in the industry that will be remembered in a few years. Moreover, the industry will likely always have sycophants, as they are the objects that drive this optimism and hype for those aspiring to achieve greatness.
We have been pointing this out for more than a decade : antitrust has been asleep at the wheel !
"World domination" is not something to be encouraged in a company !
If the worst offenders like Facebook and Uber had been made an example of and shut down then (including by pressure from other countries), we would have had a much less insane funding environment.
Seems to have missed the lesson of its immediately previous paragraph:
> The 1980s were dominated by junk bond specialists, the nineties by investment bankers, the aughts by hedge fund mangers.
Nothing was learned about the 80s, or the 90s, or the 00s (or or or ad infinitum). The parasites merely adapted to the changing environment and found new host expressions.