Odd, I thought this was pretty clear and I was even non-plussed by the article as a whole. I do believe that startups are on balance a good thing. If you're a

Odd, I thought this was pretty clear and I was even non-plussed by the article as a whole. I do believe that startups are on balance a good thing. If you're a highly educated yet junior cog at BigCo you will be decently to well paid but unproductive. Buddy of mine was a superstar at Cal and worked on HR software at Google. He's now a well thought of co-founder at a well thought of startup. He is more productive. His talents are put to better use. Buddy of my brother went to Moscow State (Stanford if you speak Russian). Fixed bugs at JavaSoft. Maintenance. Her talents were wasted. BigCo can do big things which requires a large pool of talented folks. But for the individual that might be a waste of that talent.