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In 10 years, I've only had 2-3 incidents of people demanding personal loyalty (very explicitly and directly... this stuff is not subtle) and being pissed at me for going rogue.
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I think I've largely managed to stay on SV's good side because for my own reasons, I tend to agree with startup-crowd philosophy/economics/politics about 80% of the time, and am reliably tech-positive. So the statistics have worked in my favor.
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But when I do break ranks, as I've been doing in the last week with the party line that Musk-buying-twitter-is-great, I do burn up non-trivial amounts of political capital. If you're in tech, it's probably healthy and good to periodically burn some of your political capital.
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Tech is only interesting long term, like over decades, if you're loyal to the tech itself. As in, the slowly uncovered laws and principles of how technology works. If you get trapped by the people-level loyalty circus, ultimately you'll lose whatever tech instincts you have.
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A clear "tell" is people who supposedly talk "tech and startups" but rarely say much about the tech itself, whether dumb or smart. Their attention is exclusively on the people. Psyche management etc. A kind of SV-kremlinology mindset.
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A lot of what you’ve described is just the baseline mindset of business people and investors, which at the end of the day the key players of SV are. Rather than technologists proper, they are founders/VCs who are knowledgeable about tech
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It really is not. I spent 4 years in an old-economy east coast company and have spent time in academia and around government (lived in DC for several years). SV is not like the other places. The personal loyalty demands are significantly higher, as is the general openness.
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