More and more I’m sick of VC backed startups as well, because I see how VC money is a deal with the devil that incentivizes people to focus on scale, valuations and exits rather than quality and intrinsic reward from creating a good product. This has rapidly accelerated as I watch VC unabashedly fall in line with this new presidential administration.
Not sure where to turn next though. I could walk away from tech and join a niche legacy industry, but there some much interesting stuff that I’d be closed off to as a result.
As much as I’m looking for an answer, curious if anyone else finds themselves asking the same questions.
Niches can have some deeply interesting stuff too that can keep you busy and interested for a long time, but that's more up to personal tastes whether any given niche would be a match for someone or not.
I won't go into specifics, but I've seen first-hand the achievements of such a team in a particular niche I happen to find interesting. Unbelievably cool and unique tech just hidden in plain sight and a joy to work with under the hood. On the other hand, it can feel like being on the other side of a treasure hunt, where you secretly hope one day someone outside gets nerd-sniped inside your particular niche, follows the breadcrumbs out in the open and pieces it all together, just to see what madness they could pull off.
I only ask because I wasted too long confusing the two.
Nothing wrong with that.
But you better find inspiration where it actually is, not where the light shines - either in the journey to becoming the actual beneficiary. Or in the work itself, like an artist. Like many wise people here already commented.
If you go looking, there are many non-VC backed mission driven companies that either a) aren't VC backable - often because the founding team is minority, or female, not because of any real reason, or b) the tech isn't the flavour of the month, or c) the founders are bootstrapping and don't have interest in VC.
If you've got all 3 of those, that sounds like a winner to me!
If you're in the US, which I assume you are, and particularly in SF, NYC, or even LA, or Austin, you're probably in so much of a bubble, that you just hear so much VC nonsense start-ups.
It's why I moved to Sydney, Australia (from Canada) instead of going to SF. Sydney is a hub of people doing real interesting work, and building real companies. The VC environment here is quite pathetic - maybe I'm just sour grapes because we couldn't raise, but we now realize we don't have to, and it is a HUGE relief.
BTW, myself and my co-founder were never interested in slinging-ads for big-tech. This was HUGELY helpful for me, as there is no way my co-founder would have joined if he was mostly just interested in the big paycheck and not taking on the risk and wanting to make an impact.
So, before finding interesting work, are you willing to take the drop in pay and options that big-tech offers? Are you willing to risk it on a bootstrapping start-up where you believe in the mission?
Another way may be to look at the post-growth companies that have a good product in a good niche, but are not looking for the escape velocity being a start-up. I'm thinking of places you may have thought of as "has been's" . Mozilla, IBM, etc, where interesting work is happening, but it isn't in the spotlight like may of the other big-tech firms.
Those are my thoughts.
- Work outside of tech. There are so many places where a single developer can have disproportionate impact simply because developers never work on those problems.
- Work on smaller scale problems where you have an impact on the entire solution, and not only on a tiny part of the implementation.
My job is to help immigrants settle in Germany. I still write a lot of code, but it's in support of a more concrete goal. I have a lot of agency and essentially choose what I work on. The scale is small but the impact of even simple tools is disproportionate.
It's the best job I have ever had.
So I'm back to square one.
I would say if you want to make a difference work in the public sector and that might still be viable on the state level in Blue states. But Republican led states are now aping Trump and setting up their own DOGE like apparatuses.
The real answer is the purpose for work outside of non profits is to exchange labor for money. My interest is having money appear in my account to support my addictions to food and shelter and to afford my interests
You either need to join the right group or talk to some founders.
We are bootstrapped genai company working on reducing hallucinations in LLMs and similarly we know tons of other AI companies that are bootstrapped