I was excited to work at startups for a lot of reasons. I hated the sluggish, oligarchic bureaucracy of bloated legacy companies. Their tradition, convention, and process always felt ripe for questioning, or outright disruption.
Startups seemed like the opposite: fast-moving, meritocratic, human-centered, forward-thinking. I saw them as a place where I could earn valuable experience and learn how products were built, sold, and scaled. I wanted to become an amazing software engineer. I wanted to understand how businesses actually worked. Startups felt high-risk, high-reward, and I was ready to bet on myself.
Here’s why I think my perspective here matters: I’ve worked with five startups over the past four years; three as a full time employee, and two as a contractor. I was laid off from every full time role.
Before you discredit me as someone who just can’t get along with their coworkers or can’t find their way around a tech stack, just hear me out. I don’t think my story is all too uncommon, nor do I believe that the layoffs define my future in the industry. If anything, they are more of a reflection of the chaotic nature of this space. At times, I was probably too invested in what I was working on.
At this point in my life I just don’t see what makes startups meaningfully different from any other kind of company.
Defining Startups
What even is a startup?
Wikipedia says it’s a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. Y-Combinator’s website defines it as a small, early stage company designed to grow fast.
The key concept in both definitions? Scalable. Not useful. Not profitable. Not sustainable. Just… Scalable.
To be a startup in an agreed upon sense, your idea likely needs to be for a tech company. Nobody’s calling the new coffee shop on the corner a startup. Even if that coffee shop is innovating with supply chains, building community, and turning profit in their first year. In practice, “startup” has become a term reserved for tech companies chasing explosive growth through software or software-adjacent products and services.
And the ambition is fine by me. Striving for success or relevance isn’t inherently a bad thing. But here’s my problem with startups: when we define success by potential for growth, everything else gets sacrificed. Craft, stability, maintainability, and user trust are all secondary to an ability to pitch a compelling story to investors. It’s inevitably going to be dishonest. It attracts a certain kind of person, a certain type of entrepreneur. It’s like a current that pushes a budding business in a certain kind of direction.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped building good software and started performing as “startup people” in a twisted play produced by venture capitalists, scripted by pitch decks, and held together with vibes.
The Venture Capitalist’s Game
In the world of startups, venture capital shapes everything. Pace, priorities, team structure, the business model. They might shape how a company inevitably defines its success. Once you take VC money, you’re no longer playing the same game anymore. You’re now playing the venture capitalist’s game. You’re no longer building a product, you’re building a return on investment. And you’d better build it fast.
Many startups don’t die because they were bad ideas. They die because they weren’t venture-scale ideas. They didn’t have the “total addressable market”. They couldn’t manufacture enough urgency. They didn’t fit the pitch deck template.
It’s a shame that such a huge portion of the tech industry, and a huge number of jobs for developers, depend on this warped incentive structure. Sure, nobody’s forcing you to join a startup. But if you’re in tech, they’re everywhere, and they’re hiring. And the culture that shapes them also shaped many of the companies sitting at the top. Some of the biggest tech companies were startups at one point. In this sense, the influence of the game is inescapable.
In this system, the incentive is to look valuable, not be valuable. Market capture becomes more important than real product-market fit, even if that’s all the founders ever talk about. Metrics are to be gamed. Users are nothing more than numbers. “Growth” is your new product. It is the story you sell to your next round of investors.
When revenue is optional, the optics become everything.
Language Matters
Before I dipped a toe into the startup pool, I worked in aerospace at one of the primes. A prime is industry jargon for a major aerospace company. Like FAANG, but in the defense world. Being my first corporate job after graduating college, it was a rude awakening to American working culture. Beyond the strict organizational hierarchy, snail paced communication, and a rage-inducing daily commute through Los Angeles traffic, one thing stood out to me as the most infuriating thing about working at this company: the language. The acronyms. The endless, mind-numbing, self-referential jargon.
This company had perfected the art of abstracting every meaningful part of internal communication behind an acronym. Working on something and it goes wrong? There’s an acronym for that. Need to write a report about it? There’s an acronym for that too. My job title was an acronym. Their repertoire of acronyms was bespoke — refined over decades, expansive, and borderline impenetrable. They even had an internal website where employees could look up what each acronym meant. It would’ve been funny if it weren’t so grim.
When I landed my first job at a startup, it felt like a gift from the heavens. Finally, I could delete every single acronym from my memory. Little did I know I was trading one flavor of nonsense for another. Acronyms were out. Buzzwords were in. I’d swapped BOMs and PDRs for MVPs and PMFs. Startups don’t use acronyms the way aerospace companies do. They don’t need to. They’ve got their own language. A different game, but the same rotten utility: abstraction, self-importance, and exclusion. How many 10x engineers do we need to scale our MVP from zero to one?
Language matters. We use it constantly, in code, in documentation, in the way we frame our work to each other. And in technology, there are some genuinely complicated things being worked on. Some words deserve to be complicated. Relegating a concept like photosynthesis to a monosyllabic word might not do it justice. Sometimes a big idea needs a big word.
But it seems like in pursuit of communicating our “big” ideas, someone took things too far. Many of the acronyms and buzzwords I’ve encountered do little more than seek to aggrandize things being talked about — to make them seem like they are more important than they are. Not every word has earned its place in our lexicon. It’s like costume jewelry for communication. Shiny, distracting, and ultimately hollow.
A Lack of Real Value: Tech as a Capitalist Mirror
A lot of startups feel hollow to me. And I think that’s because the system that creates them is hollow. This isn’t relegated to some niche portion of the tech industry either. A lot of work people are doing every day feels hollow. I think it’s a common sentiment, and a grounded insight, to question the value of what we’re pouring the majority of our precious lives into. A lot of people don’t feel great when they think about it, myself included.
It’s capitalism. Working at startups, we have a front row seat to watch capitalism do exactly what it’s best at: extracting value, concentrating wealth, and rewarding short-term growth over long-term good. I find it hard to believe that a wealthy minority of tech-obsessed investors know what the world needs better than anyone else. But they’re the ones with the resources to prop up any company that speaks to their view of the world and what it needs next. I think the movement in VC towards American Dynamism is a perfect example of this. It has the fingerprints of its investors’ politics and philosophies written all over it.
We have startups solving problems that don’t matter. Startups solving problems that their investors believe matter. Startups that generate synthetic demand. Startups that optimize minor conveniences for the richest among us. Startups that make up for what underfunded public infrastructure should’ve solved in the first place.
It’s not that these founders are evil. Many are idealistic, smart, and trying their very best. But the system doesn’t reward moral ambition. It rewards speed, novelty, and return on investment, and punishes nuance and restraint. Imagine if startups were judged by how much they served their users. By how much they improved quality of life. By how well they contributed to the communities they operate in. These things are difficult to measure.
What if the real underlying goal was to build something sustainable, something genuinely useful for the progression of humankind, not just something scalable?
My Ideal: Small Business for Software
I’ve always wanted to start my own company, since I was little. I was obsessed with the cultural impact, iconic branding, and creative expression that businesses can enable. I bought into the dream. If I ever do start a company, I think I know now that I don’t want to make it a startup. I need something smaller. Friendlier, even. Something profitable. User-centered. Sustainable.
I’d refuse to run on the fundraising hamster wheel. Not everything needs to grow into a behemoth. Most of us will never build the next monopoly, nor should we strive to. I’m not getting up on a stage and dancing for investors to make things happen.
I want to work with good people, building good software, at a sustainable pace. I want to work with tight, technical teams who can move fast without breaking things. Quality should matter. Experience should matter. Autonomy should be encouraged. Headcount is not a metric for success. A founder’s ability to sell to investors shouldn’t be their defining factor. I don’t think salespeople make good leaders.
Being profitable gives you freedom. Ownership is freedom. Taking huge sums of money from investors is the opposite. It adds pressure, introduces external timelines, adds conflicting interests and incentives, and replaces your user with your investor as the person you answer to. I’d rather keep it lean and keep control.
For many of the problems our economy faces, the growth of small business is a viable solution. We should be sharing the wealth a little more. The barrier to entry should be much lower than it is. Software scales, and that’s awesome. But there’s room for software that wasn’t built to scale. Software that was built to serve the communities it targets. To fill a niche. To speak to a particular group of people in a way that no other software can.
Other Valid Models
The startup monoculture has warped our collective imagination. It’s hard to imagine a tech company without its influence. But there’s life outside of it.
There are indie hackers building weird, wonderful tools for small audiences. There are co-ops prioritizing equity and sustainability. There are solo devs shipping profitable products from cafés or basements. There are artists and musicians using software to support their creative work. It’s such a shame that someone might look at these alternatives as “less ambitious”. I personally see them as more ethical, more stable, and, frankly, more human.
Tech as an industry would benefit from expanding its mainstream sense of what building can look like. Not every project needs to scale. Not every product needs a pitch. We know that statistically most startups fail. But I’d like to believe that a subset of these ideas might have thrived had they chosen a different path and financing model.
I’d like to quickly shout out the developers who are contributing to open source software. It is the backbone of every single thing we build, for products of every scale. While I don’t have a ton of experience working in the open source space, it’s something that I believe contributes to this “greater good” I’ve been referring to and something we as developers should try to keep alive at all costs, against all capitalist interests otherwise.
You Don’t Have to Play Their Game
I’m allowed to reject startup culture, and so are you. Doing so doesn’t mean we love technology any less, or belong in this industry any less. We can think differently. Hell, we can even work at these companies and keep our healthy sense of skepticism and moral grounding quietly within our understanding.
Here’s to building slowly, profitably, and thoughtfully. I think that approach is far more radical than raising a $10M seed round. I don’t need to perform the part of a “startup founder” or “startup engineer”. I don’t need to be anyone but myself. I can just build something good. Forget the theater. Forget fitting in. Forget the greedy thirst for scale and domination.
Make something that matters, and own it.