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I’m hopefully in the final “nerd meets money” job I’ll ever have and my argument is going to be that no technical person should ever take a deal from a non-tech

I’m hopefully in the final “nerd meets money” job I’ll ever have and my argument is going to be that no technical person should ever take a deal from a non-technical person. The reality, however, is that most of us are not in financial positions to be able to refuse it. I think we need to collectively figure out how to support each other so we can tell capitalist narcissists to go away. I’ve been in every possible part of these deals and In the absolute best possible case you are going to betray your own technical vision and get 1/1000th of the value that you create as output. That’s absolutely best case. Non-technical work, fundraising, sales etc is all fictional bulshit in hopes of managing the greater fool trick with the public market being the ultimate fool. Psychopathic wannabe dictators play the role of intermediary between capital and labor such that they are on one hand trying to pretend that they give a shit about their employees and their welfare and on the other hand tell their investors how much they’re gonna fuck everybody over in language that is specifically crafted to not sound like that exactly what is happening - with a massive legal apparatus that is built to prioritize the rights of capital over labor in every single case. The only reason that works is because structurally in the world that we live in today, all of the people with money generally have no functional skills and so they need to coopt people with skills, with unfair contracts, in order to do what they want to do. Capitalists need us technologists and technical labor, who know how to build an implement stuff in order to make their money. If they knew how to make stuff, they wouldn’t be asking for a “technical cofounder” If all that somebody does is bring money to the table then you can bet that that’s all they’re going to be able to bring. And you can also expect that they’re going to demand the majority of the value that is created by you because of the fact of the way finance and money works in the world. If that’s the life you wanna lead, with the idea that you too can be a lazy capitalist stealing the value from others, then as a technologist I’m not sure what to tell you. I’ve yet to encounter a technical person with any care for their craft who had a overall positive experience selling out to capitalists. I think WhatsApp is the perfect example here in that it was intended to be a tool for freedom. Now a multi billion dollar corporation spies on their multibillion users for money.

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago
I learned this too late in life. I always knew it intellectually, but to experience it first hand was something else. I looked behind the curtain of many funded startups. Here is a comment I made on another thread: "Right but usually they tell the founding engineer that they are a CTO, give them equity, but low salary. In real venture backed businesses where the equity ends up having real value, the "CTO" is gone by ~18 months. This is the point where the product is in the market, and is getting some sales. I see it constantly by non technical CEOs in NYC"

ldjkfkdsjnv 2y ago

I learned this too late in life. I always knew it intellectually, but to experience it first hand was something else. I looked behind the curtain of many funded startups. Here is a comment I made on another thread: "Right but usually they tell the founding engineer that they are a CTO, give them equity, but low salary. In real venture backed businesses where the equity ends up having real value, the "CTO" is gone by ~18 months. This is the point where the product is in the market, and is getting some sales. I see it constantly by non technical CEOs in NYC"