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I hate the term “founder”.

It grossly blurs the distinction between those who put in personal blood, sweat, tears, and money into starting a business versus those who make a few slides so they can use other people’s money to hire others to do all the work and come up with all the ideas.

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Honestly, I think we would do well to dispose of both "founder" and "startup".

We had words for this. "Small business" and "Small business owner".

They are not the same. Per VC culture, small business owner is a looser, tunning lifestyle business. They produce useful products in competitive markets and nurture relationship with customers.

Startup is meant to become monopoly and does not have to have good economics before abusing monopoly power. Competition is for loosers. It is about disrupting, not about building.

What's worse is when it is used as a job title, a role, which people are hired for!

Sounds like a complete nonsense, yet here we are.

At least the title “founder engineer” on a job requisition provides a nice immediate red flag… No need to guess!

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