All indications are that a startups success has to do a lot with pattern matching (does the founder look like Zuckerberg) and VCs don’t have a good track recor

All indications are that a startups success has to do a lot with pattern matching (does the founder look like Zuckerberg) and VCs don’t have a good track record of picking successes. They can lose money on nine out of 10 investments. They are well diversified. As an employee, you can waste years of your life at one of the other ten. And coding and architecture has little to do with a startups success - and I say this as a “coder” for 25+ years and an “architect” who gets paid decent money at BigTech working with other companies helping them design their cloud architecture.