Anil DashI’m eavesdropping (well, they’re so loud I can’t ignore them) on two young startup guys at this coffee shop, a version of a conversation I’ve heard a million times. But what’s striking vs 10 or 15 years ago is… almost nothing they’re talking about is the tech. Everything is financial engineering and how to hustle the ecosystem. Nothing about products or even markets and competition, all fussing about banks and crypto and VCs. Explains a lot about my fatigue over the industry in general.
Tiffany Lee Brown (she/they)@anildash It might also be interesting to consider that maybe someone else 10-15 years ago, sitting at a similar coffee shop, might've heard you and your bros talking about technology itself — and had a similar emotional response to how you're feeling about the $$ hustle. That sense of "How far removed are you guys from normal reality & real people?"
@magdalen I think people can tell when someone is making something out of a sincere interest in an idea vs just trying to hop on a lucrative bandwagon.
@anildash We can have sincere interests in projects that end up being of dubious benefit to society as a whole. You might've heard me having a similar coffeeshop conversation in like 1993 in the Bay Area, so I'm not pretending to be above all this! Just sayin'. One person's cool tech project that screws up thousands of real humans, loses them their jobs, etc., might be similar to another person's soulless VC pandering.