Totally agree with this. The narrative shows up in more discussions than just startup vs bigco; it's also a very common decisionmaking framework when choosing f

Totally agree with this. The narrative shows up in more discussions than just startup vs bigco; it's also a very common decisionmaking framework when choosing first jobs out of college, when choosing projects to work on while at the company, etc. It's pretty bad overall for net societal productivity. The main reasons this framework shows up so much is that (i) it's hard to really think through what kind of unique value one offers and to figure out how to leverage it, and (ii) it's tough psychologically to do something that doesn't optimize for the typical value function (prestige + income).