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, $229 retail. The model synonymous with finance and tech is the “Midtown Uniform.” He’s on a call, saying things like “we need to be thoughtful about our go-to-market plan” and “the unit economics are starting to make sense.” His MacBook has seventeen tabs. One is a slide deck titled Series A — Confidential. Another is X. His post says: “Founders: your biggest competition isn’t another startup. It’s yourself.” It has seventy-four likes.
He’s building a machine learning platform that connects dog walkers with dog owners, and he has a $500,000 pre-seed check from a general partner who went to college with his older brother. The check buys four employees, a pivot to “pet wellness,” and a group of young social media interns. In the next few months, it’ll pay for the dissolution of the company and the another experience section on his LinkedIn.
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 isn’t the problem, but the Symptom. The problem is a culture that rewards the act of building so generously, with public exposure, guaranteed capital, and attention (packaged into a “cohort”). Performance itself has become lucrative, not the product.
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.
