IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.
Your art work is beautiful by the way.
The most pure people I find are in quant finance, engaging the market at the abstract "number" level purifies everything, even if money corrupts at the individual level.
Or put another way, it would be a bit strange to say that everyone who works at a corporation is an unsuspecting loser.
From what I’ve seen, academia is both worse and better. So don’t feel like you’re missing out on something.
Just do what makes you happy.
I wish I could find the link to the essay that directly states this but I'm having trouble finding it now (and my Google-fu doesn't seem to be strong enough to locate it).
Then again, I've never been in a startup or a founder so what do I know?
Structuring SAFEs, doing mentoring and creating batches, and creating a kind of orthodoxy based on unorthodoxy done better, definitely hit a stale point. I think it's even to the point the founders could return and do it again based on what they learned, with more "stay hungry, stay foolish" again, albeit with veteran wisdom now, and it would be revolutionary all over again, upending its own past.
Thanks for finding that!
My anecdote: I worked at a startup for 4 months and I was basically playing it straight, ie, a loser. My CEO constantly kept pushing the idea of releasing a shitty product which just barely worked. His justification was that there were giant foreign competitors that raised millions of $ with admittedly very shitty products. Like I'm talking about forms that barely worked in their shitty React Native mobile apps. Anyway, our product was shitty and our users did not use the damn thing (poor retention). However, there was an easy/cheap way to grow quite quickly due to the nature of the service. It was all too much for me and I quit.
Anyway, it really dawned on me during the last few months that my boss didn't actually care about the product - he was playing the game of growing at all costs, put the nice numbers on a chart, and raise the next round of funds from VCs (a lot of them showed interest from the outside). And to be really frank, if he was honest with me that this was the actual game, that he wanted to get acquired or do an IPO purely based on growth metrics, it would be easier for me to understand. Instead, he kept talking about revolutionizing education with technology and that left a lot of us absolutely baffled.