The Startup Backlash

I got it as well. It's never happened when reading a Medium article before.

I'm really glad that this is happening, because I think the character of "tech" has gone to shit in the past few years as assholes who care only about their gaudy, disgusting parties-- but don't actually love technology or want to improve the world for real-- have come into the game.

This elite isn't ready to rule. They won't even run companies that are decent to the people who build and maintain them. It's easy to take the Silicon Valley perspective and say that the old legacy elites are full of idiots (and that's true) but "our" "elite" is just as full of useless, garbage humanity that should not be trusted to manage a bag of rock salt. Let's start with the brogrammers, douchey VCs exactly like the caricature in that Tesla video, hipster turds who become managerial favorites because their mancrushing did-their-20s-wrong bosses live vicariously through them, sloppy coders who think they're "rockstars", horrible management at all levels and in most firms, and companies using "fast failure" as an excuse to unapologetically do the wrong thing, because it's somehow OK if you're the Next Steve Jobs.

I am really glad that VC-istan has, over the past year, developed a tropical wave of a morale problem that threatens to become a Category 5 showstopper, and I'm really proud of the part that I played in that. There are a lot of brilliant, innovative people out there in this country and I can't wait to see what they come up with once they start falling for cheap lies.

Nerds are such horrible judges of character that we tend to throw obscene amounts of effort when some smooth-talking ex-IBDer (fired because he was too unethical even to sell subprime) gives us the time of day and manages to convince us (by pure assertion) that his half-baked idea will "change the world". But I'm starting to work on that problem by exposing painful truths, and maybe we can change it in some timeframe like two-thirds of a generation.

A/B testing content-gating? Well, Medium has to make money somehow...

Startups are just small companies trying to grow fast.

Some are good, some are bad; but there are systemic reasons why there are a lot of douchebags becoming founders (hint: they have the social contacts to raise money on ideas alone and tap into the private welfare system called "acq-hires") and we need to address the problem, have the conversation in a no-holds-barred format where no solution is off the table, and drive the fuckers back where they came from.

The problem isn't "startups". There are great startups out there. It's this horrible ecosystem that has become a devastating talent graveyard and the latest mechanism through which an entrenched elite can mine the brains of their intellectual superiors for extreme profit.

I actually think there were people who got Twitter from the early days. Mostly people who had studied social network and online communities in the early '00, when everyone was making them. It just wasn't necessarily interesting from a technical or business perspective until much later.