[rachofsunshine]

Everyone's just playing a bunch of investor signaling games, because founders/VCs by nature are living in the world of finance, not the world of decision-making (at least in their public personas). It's part of why I opted out of that whole world when founding my own company. Not literally so that I can listen to my angsty 13-year-old Christian rock without answering to anyone (although I certainly do do that), but because I feel like that fear colors a whole lot of what gets done in tech these days.

Engineers very often tell me something like "well I have this idea but I don't think anyone will fund it" and - well, just build it, man! Your idea takes like two grand of startup capital, and I know for a fact you made 240k last year. There's this whole mythologized idea of founders as a separate breed, encouraged in no small amount by founders themselves, but...founding a company is literally just building a thing people want and selling it to them. You can wear clown shoes and do that.