It’s a Tuesday morning in a co-working space, downtown Austin, Miami, or maybe even the Brooklyn Navy Yard. You see, the startup world has been migrating because San Francisco got too popular and expensive, and because every ambitious twenty-four-year-old needs a story about leaving somewhere and starting anew. In this co-working space, with its whiteboards covered with arrows connecting words like SCALE and MVP, its cold brew on tap, and monitors displaying live data on the latest amount of Claude Credits owned by the startup, there’s a young man with a Patagonia vest.
He isn’t just wearing a Patagonia vest. He’s wearing the Patagonia vest: navy blue and $229 retail. In the past 20 years, it’s become synonymous with finance and tech, becoming the “Midtown Uniform.” He’s on a call, talking about how they need to be thoughfulk about their go-to-market and that “the unit economics are starting to make sense.” The MacBook he’s using has seventeen tabs. Claude code is open, of course, alongside a slide deck titled Series A (Confidential). Another is X. His post, which he made while sipping on black coffee in the morning, has seventy-four likes. It says: “Founders, your biggest competition isn’t another startup. It’s yourself.”
The machine learning platform he’s build connects dog walkers and dog owners, and he’s got a $500,000 pre-seed check. The general partner who signed it went to college with his older brother. The check buys four employees, an eventual rebrand to pet wellness, a young group of growth interns (and perhaps an abg CMO). In the next four months, of course, it’ll also pay for the dissolution of the company as well as the right to add another experience to his Linkedin headline.
He will then raise another fund.
The startup culture blurred the lines between solving a problem and creating a problem to sell the solution. The Patagonia vest represents the symptom of the culture, and the overarching problem is a culture that rewards the act of building overly generously. Public exposure, guaranteed capital, and attention packaged into a cohort have made performance, and not the product and execution, lucrative.
Students watching from the outside only see the vest and the check. They want in. Of course they do. The question no one’s been asking is: in to what, exactly?
Around 1 in 10 startups make it. Even companies under Y Combinator, the most famous startup accelerator, tend to go quiet after just the first seed round. The culture has redefined “disruption” to mean making the status quo worse for most people, so a small number could profit quickly.
Historically, innovation has never looked like this: the transistor came from Bell Labs engineers with no equity. GPS was a product of the Air Force. The internet was another government project. mRNA vaccine technology that ended the most recent pandemic was developed by a biochemist, Katalin Karikó, who was demoted by her university for wasting time on it.
The ‘underlying victim’ of the culture is the students without safety nets. Those with a wealthier background could spend two years on a failing startup, but those without the same cushion lose two years and everything they borrowed to afford them.
For every ten Patagonia vestmen in Miami, I believe there’s a young man in Memphis with a Polo shirt. He’s building inventory software for independent restaurants because his aunt owned one, and he watched her lose money for years because of unpredictable spoilage. He’s got 12 customers and 3 months of runway.
He’s also on the phone, but with a customer. Trying to understand why they went quiet, and how to fix it.
The work is still what matters, and what will always matter. The people who changed things knew this, and most of them look nothing like the story we tell about them afterwards.
