On the other hand, it kills me when people think having a unique taste in music is representative of anything other than having a unique taste in music (i.e. that one's taste in music has anything to do with being original or contrarian).

It seems sensible to me that the people who spend a lot of time doing something like creating a successful business do not spend much of their time curating a unique taste in music.

Everyone's just playing a bunch of investor signaling games, because founders/VCs by nature are living in the world of finance, not the world of decision-making (at least in their public personas). It's part of why I opted out of that whole world when founding my own company. Not literally so that I can listen to my angsty 13-year-old Christian rock without answering to anyone (although I certainly do do that), but because I feel like that fear colors a whole lot of what gets done in tech these days.

Engineers very often tell me something like "well I have this idea but I don't think anyone will fund it" and - well, just build it, man! Your idea takes like two grand of startup capital, and I know for a fact you made 240k last year. There's this whole mythologized idea of founders as a separate breed, encouraged in no small amount by founders themselves, but...founding a company is literally just building a thing people want and selling it to them. You can wear clown shoes and do that.

always have been, mate.

the nonconformist iconoclast disruptor meme is because that's what the market wanted to see, and most founders wanted that money.

now the luster is gone, and there is no need to put on a black turtleneck and pretend you're revolutionizing the world. now you need to hype your AI strategy and sound confident that you have some idea how that will play out.

How does liking music make someone a “conformist”? I don’t know anyone who thinks, “I need to make sure my music taste conforms to societal norms.” People add songs to their playlists because they like them.