It's interesting that tech experience was the negative cited by these companies, but it sounds like the positions were high-level ("founding PM"). Product mana

It's interesting that tech experience was the negative cited by these companies, but it sounds like the positions were high-level ("founding PM"). Product management has a wider spectrum of actual responsibilities than engineering, in my opinion -- "product manager" is akin to "restaurant manager." It depends greatly on what the company is looking for in their PMs. Having tech experience will always give you a head-start over PMs who have no formal tech roles on their resume (me), but some companies really value the more religious, navel-gazing side of product management, and if you're not boned up on that, you'll get humbled quickly. I'm not saying that's you, mind you, but I've worked with technical PMs who are engineers-turned-PMs and really are just well-spoken engineers more than true PMs who love problems. I only know what you shared in the post, but the last paragraph is interesting -- it sounds like you'd like to target FAANG companies, but you've gotten contacted by startups -- again, much different environments. I wouldn't overanalyze what the startups said about your tech experience. Have you gotten any PM interviews with big tech companies? It's a bit of a bloodbath right now with layoffs everywhere, so you might have some waiting out to do.