One more quote to start this off. I do not bring a weapon. I am the weapon. -- Michael O. Church I like the overarching theme of what the OP is saying. Good c

One more quote to start this off. I do not bring a weapon. I am the weapon. -- Michael O. Church I like the overarching theme of what the OP is saying. Good companies provide multiple ways to succeed. Shitty firms provide multiple ways to fail, and only one way to succeed. That's why closed allocation is such a pile of 9/11 nukular buttfail: because it's founded on the idea that a person is only admitted one avenue for success (but there are numerous ways a person might lose face). Good institutions provide multiple ways for the people within them to succeed. This encourages creativity. Bad companies lay down multiple ways to fail, and only admit one way to succeed. It is known. I don't think this is only an artifact of company size. I've seen small companies with that negative, embarrassment-averse culture; I've also seen large companies create pockets of the positive, open-allocation type culture. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t find something in my Twitter feed crowing about how a startup that has hit a bump in the road is ”fu&%@d,” or what an “ash%le” a successful founder is, or what an utterly idiotic idea somebody’s company is. I am all for product risk and innovation. If someone tries to cure cancer and fails, I'm going to praise her to the moon for trying. On the other hand, moral failure (asshole founders) I cannot support. There is a huge difference between a scientist who tries for 20 years to cure cancer and falls short (but probably delivers a lot of useful research along the way) and an Evan Spiegel, who fails morally. "We're a startup" has been used too many times to justify reckless management and moral bankruptcy. Well I say: fuck that shit. I am all for removing the stigma against good-faith failure. The problem in the VC-funded startup world is all the bad-faith failure that is out there. When someone gets fired with no severance because his 24-year-old, inexperienced, technically incompetent manager turns out to be a wad, no one should congratulate the company for "taking a risk". Recklessness, the defining trait of the current crop of VC-funded cool kids, is not a virtue. It seems like there is a movement to replace today’s startup culture of hope and curiosity with one of smug superiority. That "culture of hope and curiosity" is long gone. Snarky people like me are working our asses off in the effort to bring it back. We do it by taking down the Evan Spiegels and Lucas Duplans of the world. We need to take out the trash so there is some fucking space for the good guys. Some people would like to turn the technology startup world into one great big company with a degenerative Can’t-Do Culture. That's VC-istan, not in some future dystopia but right now. With all of the co-funding and note-sharing and collusion, VC has degenerated into a feudal reputation economy that behaves like a large and dysfunctional company where people are too busy padding their resumes and manicuring their reputations to even consider doing anything remotely ballsy. That's exactly what has already happened.