The 'Startup Boom' is a disguised jobs fair for big corporations

aridiculous, you're right that devs/tech people hold a lot of cards in the modern economy… they can do all you said and more. But they almost never do. Holding the cards is worthless when you don't know you're playing a game, much less that you have a winning hand already.

That's why most "startup guys and girls" work and scrimp and suffer and sleep under their desks for a minority share in nothing, while VCs (the business types) laugh all the way to the bank.

Because taking outside capital is like forking over your hand of cards AND promising to only play tiddlywinks in the future.

Whoever holds the money, holds the power. Unless the other party wakes up to realize that they don't need the money.

The fact is that for the past decade (and getting better all the time), it costs virtually nothing to start a profitable web-based business. Almost no one truly needs the money men at all. Tech types still think they do, though. They want the security & validation & ease of being handed a great big whack of cash. Which means they end up the person without power.

The amazing thing about developers, designers, teachers & writers is that we not only own the means of production, we carry them with us IN OUR HEADS. We walk around thinking we need to appease the factory owners so we can get to work, but we don't.

Yes. And on top of that, another dirty little secret -- when a startup is the fly buzzing around the ear of the big, established company, and it keeps buzzing and buzzing, the big, established company finds it easier to swat than compete with its own buzzing little irritants.

And it's a lot easier to swat a fly after you bought it and locked it down with a vesting agreement. A fly that's running around free might require a chase.

Lots of acquisitions are to destroy or at least undermine a competitor, potential competitor, or other disruption.

Which is why the chest-thumping "change the world!!" "disrupt!!" "free yourself, you caged lion you!!" rhetoric around startups is so sad. The "logical" result is usually the destruction of the startup itself, and the yoking of the founders to an agreement which forces them to stay at a big company -- the company that destroyed or undermined their baby -- in a JOB (cage) for years to get their payoff.

Miserable.

Having met quite a lot of startup founders post-sale (on the conf circuit, in speakers' dinners and green rooms), I can say… I have never met one who was thrilled about the money, and mostly they have struck me as tired, sad, and defeated.

I believe that your metaphor above is correct in getting at some features of the startup world, namely:

1) Many founders are attracted by glory rather than logic.

2) Large companies receive research information from startup successes and failures.

But I don't agree with the gladiator metaphor at all because it implies a degree of deviousness and collusion that isn't present in the startup sphere, and is disingenuous to imply.

Take your example of the king offering $0.5M for the finder of a treasure. Here you imply that his goal of offering the prize is to "give villagers a fake hope" and "inspire the poor".

What if the treasure in reality was just worth $0.6M to him? Then the king might conclude a) if someone had the treasure, he'd be happy to pay $0.5, but b) suppose the cost of finding the treasure via hire at $1M, then it is not worth hiring people to dig it up.

Thus, the king may not decide to hire people to dig this, while happily posting a prize. He doesn't need to have ulterior motives to do this.

Now let's take the economics further. Suppose some people are efficient and other people are not efficient diggers (they're good bakers), and there is no way to observe this beforehand. Then if he hires people to dig, the king will lose money because he's at half efficiency with half bakers and half diggers. If he posts a prize, the efficient diggers will self sort into digging, and the bakers will produce real good.

Our data points are few, and really just 1) and 2), so we can't know for sure companies are being evil (and I don't believe they are). It's a classic case of an underdetermined system.