Before Tech became the dominant industry, jobs like investment banking were generally viewed as the best expected-value career trade to make out of school in terms of money, training, and accrued social capital.
I love this. The post is awesome. In particular, it's something people have felt for a while and you've put into words. When I started in venture, within a few years, I could tell something was off and going to get more off. It was just such a sexy and high-status industry.
And I've always felt that every decade has kind of had different high-status jobs. Like, maybe not in the entire zeitgeist, but overall. Like, I think 60s had ad agencies. I think the 80s had consulting, I think the 90s had entertainment (see Entourage). And then I think in the 2000s it was finance. I'm think government and military careers had a long reign too (maybe all of history) before Watergate and Vietnam.
I knew this was gonna happen in tech because the people working in it seemed to be the same types of people who would have worked in the other industries before, and I also knew that it just happens historically so it felt like a safe bet. But it's really hard for me to put into words what the catalyst would be.
I think 2016 was probably part of it, when ad sales led to something people didn't like (i.e. the CAnlytica scandal) and governments started cozying to tech and vice versa I think that broke a lot of people. Moreso because it was clear that tech was institutionalized.
I think industries all begin their descent in status the moment they hire lobbyists.
Music as an industry died in terms of its mystique, virtuosity, coolness, and status the moment they sued Napster. Military started a descent the moment Eisenhower identified the military industrial complex. Ads, when they lobbied to sell sugary snacks to kids on TV. Finance when they got bailed out.
That said, idk what's next either, I mean there are only so many things a human can do I guess, so maybe industries recycle? My guess is politics is going to come back into vogue at some point in the next twenty years.
But is it because politics is going to be a vehicle for making progress on income, education, and healthcare inequality, or is it just going to be viewed as "sexy" because of career outcomes tied to it?
supply vs demand shift for competent people due of AI. Politics (at least in democracies) becomes relatively more attractive. Politics as one of the last “human realms”
One of the most thoughtful pieces I have read recently Michael! And it captures something I’ve been feeling for a while. This doesn’t read like a single “crisis” so much as slow cultural exhaustion.
What stands out to me is the growing disenfranchisement from systems that retain power but lose soul. When the gap between stated values and lived culture widens, people don’t just disengage, they start optimising for coherence instead.
Like you, I’m not sure what the replacement or “next” looks but maybe unlikely to be another dominant path or industry. It feels more like a shift in orientation: away from global, homogenised behemoths toward smaller, more values-aligned ecosystems where meaning, craft, and community matter again. Less optimisation theatre, more reality.
In a world saturated with templates for winning - aesthetics, narratives, even artificial supplementation - authenticity and alignment start functioning as real advantages. Not anti-tech, but far more intentional about where and how it’s used. The irony is that in a world optimised to death, the things people actually gravitate toward are the ones that still feel human, internally honest, and lived - not performed.
Absolutely outstanding read of the whole situation.
It can probably even be just dumbed down to a numbers game: there's just too many people. Too many founders, certainly too many VCs,maybe too many employees.
The status problem goes beyond what gets built — it determines which markets get built for. Consider: a founder walks in with a product that gives patients an upfront cost calculation for out-of-pocket healthcare procedures. Real problem, novel solution. The VC response writes itself: "People on Medicaid and Medicare don't pay for it, so they don't care. People with employer-sponsored plans don't pay for it, so they don't care. ACA and alternative plans aren't a big enough SAM. Insurance won't pay for it. So, who are you really selling to? Pass." Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans lack employer-sponsored coverage, and deductibles are hollowing out the rest. The market is enormous — it's just not legible. Same holds true on dependent care, housing, education... all the markets in most dire need of 'startups'. And so on goes the cycle: would-be founders building boring legible businesses, to sell to boring legibility-seeking VCs.
The rise of hard tech and building what has historically been considered “low status” in physical manufacturing, chemistry, factories is attracting more principled founders who care little for status and are building on vibes belief conviction in a future that is country driven.
This is a heavy piece. I'd take it a step further directionally and say we're heading toward a post-labor society because of AI. Not that soon of course, but eventually. I think we'd be better off with far less focus on status seeking. Evolutionarily we needed status and aggression to propagate our species and compete for scarce resources. It'd be great if the future brings an era or epoch of less tribalism and greater collective collaboration.
As someone new to the founder/VC world... i found this piece to be quite refreshing!
Coming in from the outside, the first thing you notice is the bling and status theater... everyone 'building', everyone 'allocating', lots of logos and vibes.
Compared to PE, VC feels it has more soul and potential for real change.
But on the ground, the demand–supply dynamics feel wildly imbalanced and weirdly opaque. There’s so much legible ambition and so little transparency about how capital actually gets decided, concentrated, and justified.
Also, the around how the 'path' itself has become default resonates. From where I’m sitting, everything feels less like find-a-unique-insight-and-build-something-weird, and more like play-the-same-crowded-vague-underexplained-game-and-hope-you’re-one-of-the-lucky-few.
It is between the story and the structure is where a lot of the disillusionment seems to live.
“This is about the path itself becoming the default.3 It is about a world in which starting a venture-backed company has become the thing you do when you’re ambitious and want to be perceived as smart, in the same way that going into banking used to be the thing you did when you were ambitious and wanted to be perceived as successful.”
> "None of these points are a singular crisis but together they produce a slow realization that the startup path has absorbed into the same institutional logic it was supposed to be the antidote to."
> Fourth, people will stop building venture-backed businesses. The psyop that even though you have a data center of thousands of Nobel laureates (or engineers) at your fingertips for $200/month and some API credits you still need to raise tens of millions of dollars will start to degrade. This is a bit of a meme and I don’t think VC will die, but there might just be different distributions of outcomes or capital efficiency over time.
I think this just means the VC backed businesses shift in the long run towards things which remain actually hard and capex intensive (i.e., building things in the real world not software). I do think that despite this, there is probably just way too much VC $$$ looking for companies than there are companies which actually need VC capital for the foreseeable future, which means the asset class could be in for a rough time over the next 5 years. And of course in software in the short-term, it remains true that even though the cost of production just went down a ton, this just means you can do much more with a raise of the same size...
On FROs and non-profits, after investigating this a lot for the last 9 months my intuition is that most non-profit ideas (e.g., in AI) should really be for-profits anyway. I don't think that path will remain super appealing to young people in the long run because without corporation equity the founder's investment of their life does not compound in the same way.
“Founder” becoming the new banking is a brutal observation that its the same prestige script, in a different uniform. I think VCs have the mirror-image problem, where every deal gets narrated through some recycled historical template. Wrote about that here: https://lukechen.substack.com/p/the-use-and-misuse-of-history-in
the part about vibes as competitive advantage is undersold. anthropic didn't just out-safety openai. they out-cultured them, and that's now a recruiting moat.
Enjoyed this. Recently learned that GV partner was negatively surprised when they tried to meet with SSI and was brushed off. They are an investor in SSI
I liked this post, but I do think solopreneurs are entering their golden age. I don't think they need that human connection. They get it enough from the zooms & slacks. As for the real human connection, as we spin up our agent forces to build for us, we will have more time to spend with our genuine friends & family members.
I love this. The post is awesome. In particular, it's something people have felt for a while and you've put into words. When I started in venture, within a few years, I could tell something was off and going to get more off. It was just such a sexy and high-status industry.
And I've always felt that every decade has kind of had different high-status jobs. Like, maybe not in the entire zeitgeist, but overall. Like, I think 60s had ad agencies. I think the 80s had consulting, I think the 90s had entertainment (see Entourage). And then I think in the 2000s it was finance. I'm think government and military careers had a long reign too (maybe all of history) before Watergate and Vietnam.
I knew this was gonna happen in tech because the people working in it seemed to be the same types of people who would have worked in the other industries before, and I also knew that it just happens historically so it felt like a safe bet. But it's really hard for me to put into words what the catalyst would be.
I think 2016 was probably part of it, when ad sales led to something people didn't like (i.e. the CAnlytica scandal) and governments started cozying to tech and vice versa I think that broke a lot of people. Moreso because it was clear that tech was institutionalized.
I think industries all begin their descent in status the moment they hire lobbyists.
Music as an industry died in terms of its mystique, virtuosity, coolness, and status the moment they sued Napster. Military started a descent the moment Eisenhower identified the military industrial complex. Ads, when they lobbied to sell sugary snacks to kids on TV. Finance when they got bailed out.
That said, idk what's next either, I mean there are only so many things a human can do I guess, so maybe industries recycle? My guess is politics is going to come back into vogue at some point in the next twenty years.
Agree on politics being back in vogue soon
But is it because politics is going to be a vehicle for making progress on income, education, and healthcare inequality, or is it just going to be viewed as "sexy" because of career outcomes tied to it?
supply vs demand shift for competent people due of AI. Politics (at least in democracies) becomes relatively more attractive. Politics as one of the last “human realms”
One of the most thoughtful pieces I have read recently Michael! And it captures something I’ve been feeling for a while. This doesn’t read like a single “crisis” so much as slow cultural exhaustion.
What stands out to me is the growing disenfranchisement from systems that retain power but lose soul. When the gap between stated values and lived culture widens, people don’t just disengage, they start optimising for coherence instead.
Like you, I’m not sure what the replacement or “next” looks but maybe unlikely to be another dominant path or industry. It feels more like a shift in orientation: away from global, homogenised behemoths toward smaller, more values-aligned ecosystems where meaning, craft, and community matter again. Less optimisation theatre, more reality.
In a world saturated with templates for winning - aesthetics, narratives, even artificial supplementation - authenticity and alignment start functioning as real advantages. Not anti-tech, but far more intentional about where and how it’s used. The irony is that in a world optimised to death, the things people actually gravitate toward are the ones that still feel human, internally honest, and lived - not performed.
yup, people aren't dropping out, they're just quietly realigning around things that actually make sense to them. the exodus
Absolutely outstanding read of the whole situation.
It can probably even be just dumbed down to a numbers game: there's just too many people. Too many founders, certainly too many VCs,maybe too many employees.
The status problem goes beyond what gets built — it determines which markets get built for. Consider: a founder walks in with a product that gives patients an upfront cost calculation for out-of-pocket healthcare procedures. Real problem, novel solution. The VC response writes itself: "People on Medicaid and Medicare don't pay for it, so they don't care. People with employer-sponsored plans don't pay for it, so they don't care. ACA and alternative plans aren't a big enough SAM. Insurance won't pay for it. So, who are you really selling to? Pass." Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans lack employer-sponsored coverage, and deductibles are hollowing out the rest. The market is enormous — it's just not legible. Same holds true on dependent care, housing, education... all the markets in most dire need of 'startups'. And so on goes the cycle: would-be founders building boring legible businesses, to sell to boring legibility-seeking VCs.
Have been feeling a similar flavor of this lack of alignment which I wrote about in a post over the weekend: https://open.substack.com/pub/bethanythebuilder/p/opting-out-of-unicorn-economics
The rise of hard tech and building what has historically been considered “low status” in physical manufacturing, chemistry, factories is attracting more principled founders who care little for status and are building on vibes belief conviction in a future that is country driven.
This is a heavy piece. I'd take it a step further directionally and say we're heading toward a post-labor society because of AI. Not that soon of course, but eventually. I think we'd be better off with far less focus on status seeking. Evolutionarily we needed status and aggression to propagate our species and compete for scarce resources. It'd be great if the future brings an era or epoch of less tribalism and greater collective collaboration.
Would you say that aggression and status were directed towards other species and have now been turned inwards?
As someone new to the founder/VC world... i found this piece to be quite refreshing!
Coming in from the outside, the first thing you notice is the bling and status theater... everyone 'building', everyone 'allocating', lots of logos and vibes.
Compared to PE, VC feels it has more soul and potential for real change.
But on the ground, the demand–supply dynamics feel wildly imbalanced and weirdly opaque. There’s so much legible ambition and so little transparency about how capital actually gets decided, concentrated, and justified.
Also, the around how the 'path' itself has become default resonates. From where I’m sitting, everything feels less like find-a-unique-insight-and-build-something-weird, and more like play-the-same-crowded-vague-underexplained-game-and-hope-you’re-one-of-the-lucky-few.
It is between the story and the structure is where a lot of the disillusionment seems to live.
“This is about the path itself becoming the default.3 It is about a world in which starting a venture-backed company has become the thing you do when you’re ambitious and want to be perceived as smart, in the same way that going into banking used to be the thing you did when you were ambitious and wanted to be perceived as successful.”
Geez. Real and very true.
> "None of these points are a singular crisis but together they produce a slow realization that the startup path has absorbed into the same institutional logic it was supposed to be the antidote to."
This part reminded me a lot of Venkatesh Rao's "Entrepreneurs Are the New Labor" series (https://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2012/09/03/entrepreneurs-are-the-new-labor-part-i/) now coming up on 14 years old.
Nice essay!
> Fourth, people will stop building venture-backed businesses. The psyop that even though you have a data center of thousands of Nobel laureates (or engineers) at your fingertips for $200/month and some API credits you still need to raise tens of millions of dollars will start to degrade. This is a bit of a meme and I don’t think VC will die, but there might just be different distributions of outcomes or capital efficiency over time.
I think this just means the VC backed businesses shift in the long run towards things which remain actually hard and capex intensive (i.e., building things in the real world not software). I do think that despite this, there is probably just way too much VC $$$ looking for companies than there are companies which actually need VC capital for the foreseeable future, which means the asset class could be in for a rough time over the next 5 years. And of course in software in the short-term, it remains true that even though the cost of production just went down a ton, this just means you can do much more with a raise of the same size...
On FROs and non-profits, after investigating this a lot for the last 9 months my intuition is that most non-profit ideas (e.g., in AI) should really be for-profits anyway. I don't think that path will remain super appealing to young people in the long run because without corporation equity the founder's investment of their life does not compound in the same way.
“Founder” becoming the new banking is a brutal observation that its the same prestige script, in a different uniform. I think VCs have the mirror-image problem, where every deal gets narrated through some recycled historical template. Wrote about that here: https://lukechen.substack.com/p/the-use-and-misuse-of-history-in
the part about vibes as competitive advantage is undersold. anthropic didn't just out-safety openai. they out-cultured them, and that's now a recruiting moat.
this is the best breakdown of what's actually happening in tech status i've read in a while. saving this one
Enjoyed this. Recently learned that GV partner was negatively surprised when they tried to meet with SSI and was brushed off. They are an investor in SSI
I liked this post, but I do think solopreneurs are entering their golden age. I don't think they need that human connection. They get it enough from the zooms & slacks. As for the real human connection, as we spin up our agent forces to build for us, we will have more time to spend with our genuine friends & family members.