Fair criticism, so let me make a few points on that. Startups can't afford full, unconstrained open allocation. They have to give people a high degree of trust

Fair criticism, so let me make a few points on that. Startups can't afford full, unconstrained open allocation. They have to give people a high degree of trust and autonomy, but they've also got to be able to meld as a team and hit a target quickly. It's when you're past 20-40 people that the open vs. closed allocation really becomes critical. (VC is causing companies to grow rapidly beyond that 20-40 mark without developing a coherent culture, and if that phase happens poorly or wrongly, you're more likely to get a crappy closed-allocation company.) At 8 people when you're fighting for your life, you just need people to do the work that needs to get done. These beasts fueled by VC aren't really "startups" in the classical sense. They don't offer meaningful, life-changing equity and, while clueless people go all-in, the smarter ones just treat employee positions at them as stepping stones. They're closed-allocation companies that are good at dressing themselves as startups. The true power relationships are intense and harsh, but not stated upfront. Open-allocation companies are subject, of course, to many of the same political problems as closed-allocation firms. I think that they're less likely to fall into certain failure modes, and I think the evidence is strong that, while open allocation isn't a panacea, closed allocation is strictly worse. Let's say that you're running a school and one fistfight breaks out per week. That's not a good thing, and you'll have kids out for hospitalizations. But if you arm a randomly selected 10% of the population with handguns, now you're at risk people getting killed. Adding the guns to a fight-prone environment was a mistake. Similarly, closed allocation adds something that can only be harmful; but the absence of it doesn't guarantee a lack of harm. In banks, the power relationships are more legible; however, there's more of a need for management to lead, perhaps in part because there isn't an army of clueless 22-year-olds (well, except in "analyst" programs; but even those are more selective than employee-level positions in the Valley.) Managers in finance are more likely to treat their positions as mutual and symbiotic than the "I know all of Sand Hill Road and you don't" founders who now run the Valley.