# Dead players 06/23/26 Something is in the water. Startups & technology feel like they've taken a vulgar connotation, culturally; not just among the buyers of late-2010s "techlash" (whose opinions I don't care about), but even among the people at the very center of it who are doing well. It's not some hot social or cultural conflict; it's an ambient negativity. Even tech's most vocal proponents feel like they are "contending," "defending," and operating relative to a broader frame of pessimism and ennui. If they aren't contending and defending; they've made a humor-laden, slightly cynical _peace_ with that pessimistic frame, and are "chopping wood and carrying water." Something is off. Or maybe it's a lot of little things. --- There is a fatigue people have with an imagined cliche of an accelerator-branded startup. In this imagination, the startup either: 1. Finds other startups in the batch to sell into 2. Finds yet-another — obvious, but neglected — burning fire in some narrow sector of the economy, and offer to put it out These motions create genuine economic — material, important — value. The world is richer for them, and we're lucky that this is where ambition directs itself. But there's something *about* this sort of thing that has _returned_ to producing the "ick" in people. The nausea with the former I think is obvious: it feels a bit like some sort of ARR-juicing scheme, where all of the money in the ecosystem originates from the investors, rather than actual external customers. I think it's a real phenomenon, but also a straw-man. In the latter (burning fire) category: the modalities and product bundles you'll find sold in these categories tend to repeat themselves. * The "neobank" wave emerged from the fact that _everyone_ is selling into some stereotypically-neglected sector of the economy — think agriculture, freight, every middle-American thing the tech bro is presumed alienated from — and that they inevitably want to sell banking, payments, and spend in their bundle. It turns out that finance is good business, one of the few real levers to improve the life of a business or consumer, and all of these people have investors seeking venture-sized returns. "Stablecoins" just make this opportunity more near-term _[[Why you'd issue a branded stablecoin like McDonaldsCoin#^8664e3|accessible]]_ to developers and founders than regular partner banking (easier means of embedded deposits & payments). * The hottest thing now is the resale of intelligence: agents (etc). Pay OpenAI $1, charge $2 for a harness around it specialized towards a particular sector of the economy. Embed — forward-deploy — into this sector, and infuse it with AI. Etc. Good chance it's the same kind of sector you'd have sold a neobank into a year or two ago. * The original, of course, is the good old-fashioned database. SaaS has always been well-modeled databases with easy-to-use interfaces and good org modeling. There are two sorts of qualms these sorts of "templates" produce (despite being productive economic activity). For one: it reminds me of the early days of hackathons when sponsors would offer "API prizes." A resulting meta was to wrap a sponsor API in a somewhat predictable app (though, to your credit - you'd have hand-coded the thing). This move — back then — was low-status compared to using *none* of the sponsor APIs, and doing something more generative and one-of-one (sometimes reverse-engineering APIs and platforms that did not _want_ you to reverse-engineer them). Every API key you could get was a slight dent in your perceived ambitions. There is a prestige delta between reseller and inventor. The other qualm comes from people's felt sense that the proverbial PE bro does not give a shit about [HVAC](https://x.com/litcapital/status/1779214211517759985). You just picked that sector because you saw the dollar signs above it. This is sort of unfair to the startup founder (and to the PE bro, while we're here). Does the *classic* HVAC business owner care *deeply* or *uniquely* about HVAC? People forget that HVAC exists thanks to people similar in motives to the startup founder: observers of a need in the market, willing takers of risk, and motivated pursuers of wealth. I don't think this is something one should apologize for. The modern world — and all its comforts — are in large part the product of these motives. But I don't think the gut feeling of the crowd is entirely unfounded. These are our smartest people. They receive highly prestigious, gate-kept educations (or at least conspicuously drop out of them). They're supposed to be *changing the world,* not just capitalizing on highly-legible opportunities. Their work is supposed to be *their* life's work; an incarnation of who *they* are as people. They're supposed to see radical, weird futures no one else can see: and put *themselves* on the line to materialize them. *This* is the original brand of technology. This is also the brand that tech still tries to maintain: while simultaneously setting its ambitions lower, in pursuit of more measured, predictable wealth and success. There is a classic charisma to the traditional HVAC business operator, because that's all they present themselves as. Even someone running ten, or a hundred, or a thousand HVAC businesses — with the same sort of leverage an eg. vertical SaaS might have within its vertical — is a surprisingly linear increment, vibe-wise. As a business, private equity *buys* you, in order to reshape you for profit. Software, on the other hand, *sells to* *you*, to reshape you for profit. There is something warmer-and-fuzzier about software, but they're closer than they get credit for. Many of my smartest ex-B2B-SaaS friends are in rollups and branded-for-AI private equity already. Software sells itself as non-linear and highly-leveraged, based on the fact that code is transmissible globally, in a mechanically trivial fashion. This is true, but I'd argue in many cases that this leverage is analogous to (if not a direct incarnation of) of money (and finance) itself. Money is another information transmission tool. Code and money are forms of force and structure, and are leveraged in their ability to spread those things far and wide. iPhones, social networks, LLMs, Claude Code, self-driving cars (hell, Bitcoin) are the *sort* of non-linear increments that most people in tech would *prefer* to present their work as. They're not just sheer force, nor structure, though they're comprised of those things (lots of code, and lots of money). They are _particular_, analogy-resistant, ripples in the broad human fabric. You don't create this stuff to improve a slice of the world, nor to make a good profit. You do it either by accident, or in the process of trying to do the impossible or unprecedented. You take a universalizing approach. Anyways. I think some of the ennui for me stems from the facts that: 1. The smartest people I know still pick the PE-like software option, over the ripple-in-the-fabric one. It's locally higher EV. There was a sense in the 2010s that the tech industry would change this dynamic; eg. the hackNY fellowship I'm an alumni of was founded in 2010 with the explicit goal of converting would-be Wall-Streeters to startup employees. The would-be-Wall-Streeters are now startup employees! But I think the underlying phenomenon runs far deeper, and is harder to shake. 2. Even the "ripple in the fabric" category is increasingly impersonal and lower-risk! And this is good: it supplies talent who would otherwise have no *personal* reason to take the risk and pursue the moonshot. But the *art* is lost, at least in the majority of cases. There are certainly exceptions. I like to think that I picked [one](https://natural.co); exhaustive, indulgent, "too early," polarizing, fiat, centralized, regulated, broad, careful — applied to the buildout of novel payment rails, on the ground in 2026, feels closer to the [$3M recording camp](https://www.finallyoffline.com/article/my-beautiful-dark-twisted-fantasy-cost-3m-to-make-mmz3hfpa) Kanye ran in Hawaii in 2010 to produce his magnum opus (as strained as that comparison might come off to you, now). Dropping the 'art' and going 'commercial' is how the best things move from scarce luxuries to abundant commodities, so I don't want to over-wax here. But something in the soul craves the scarce, luxurious, impractical, risky thing — I think intelligent, ambitious people *especially* crave this — but the window of time during which this industry carried that appearance writ large, has mostly elapsed. People (and companies) are simultaneously more ambitious than ever; but more risk-averse than ever too. You'll aim for the stars, but only in order to dodge the permanent underclass. I don't think it'll matter to the right people. They'll probably carry over their technical abilities, their interests in eg. programming or tinkering, writing, etc, to whichever frontier is the risky, personal, ambitious one for them. Whichever frontier is the _actual_ frontier. _Featured in [TL;DR Founders](https://tldr.tech/founders/2026-06-24#:~:text=Aiming%20for%20the%20stars%20now%20feels%20more%20impersonal%20and%20lower%2Drisk%20than%20ever.)_ %% ![[Screenshot 2026-06-24 at 8.23.01 PM.png]] %% %% ## 80-20, vertical software, and B2B SaaS ## Personal brands ## The actual risk moved elsewhere ## Running out of excuses %%