# 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 candidly 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 a YC startup. In this imagination, the YC 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 Sprinkle some "vertical," "B2B," and "SaaS" in there for good measure. To be extra clear on my view: 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. * Stablecoin neo-banks emerge from the fact that _everyone_ selling into some stereotypically-neglected sector of the economy — think agriculture, freight, every middle-American thing the tech bro is presumed alienated from — *eventually* wants to sell banking & expense management in their product. 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 *accessible* to ambitious developers and founders than regular partner banking (easier means of embedded deposits & payments). * The resale of inference: agents (etc). Pay OpenAI $1, and charge $2 for a harness around it specialized towards a "neglected sector of the economy." Embed — forward-deploy — into the neglected sector of the economy, and infuse it with AI. Etc. * 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 this all produces (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). I think this is sort of unfair to the startup founder (and to the PE bro, while we're here). Is the *classic* HVAC business owner someone who deeply cares about HVAC? People forget that HVAC exists because of people similar in motivation 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 feel apologetic over. The modern world — and all its comforts — are in large part the product of people like this. But I don't think the gut feeling of the crowd is entirely unfounded. "Founders" used to aim for the _stars_. Civilizational things. These are our smartest people. They receive highly prestigious, gate-kept educations. 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're given credit for. Many of my smartest ex-B2B-SaaS friends are in rollups and branded-for-AI private equity nowadays. iPhones, social networks, LLMs, self-driving cars (hell, Bitcoin) are the sort of *non-linear* increments that most people in tech would *prefer* to present their work as. You don't create this stuff to marginally improve 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. To distill where the weirdness originates in my psyche, it's probably that: 1. The smartest people I know still pick the covertly-PE option, over the technology one. There was a sense in the 2010s that the tech industry would change this dynamic, but I think it runs far deeper, and is harder to shake. 2. The non-linear option also feels more impersonal and lower-risk than ever. This is good: it supplies talent who would otherwise have no *personal* reason to take the risk and pursue the moonshot. I think, holistically, the *art* is lost. This is good: this is how the best things move from scarce luxuries to abundant commodities. But something in the soul craves the scarce, luxurious, economically-impractical, risky thing — I think intelligent, ambitious people *especially* crave this — but the window of time in which this industry carried that appearance has mostly closed. Weirdly: I don't think it'll matter to the right people. You will probably carry over your technical abilities, your interest in programming and tinkering, etc to whichever frontier is the risky, personal, ambitious one for you. And if you don't; it's unclear you would have in the early innings of the modern tech industry, either. %% ## 80-20, vertical software, and B2B SaaS ## Personal brands ## The actual risk moved elsewhere ## Running out of excuses %%