[georgemcbay]

"e.g. you're mining titanium from the moon using gravity fields, you're desalinating sea water"

The fundamental disconnect here is that while there are some "startups" that actually do novel things, most are more like "build some ruby on rails app that does XYZ thing that has always been done, but do it on computers, and maybe cheaper than the big guy can by just ignoring existing regulations until we get big enough that anyone cares".

And then you wind up with a startup company probably full of 20 year olds who are smart and driven but haven't yet seen the hundreds of ways in which they can paint themselves into a corner with bad software practices which creates this negative feedback loop where everyone is working 80-120 hours spinning their wheels trying to get shit to "just work" whereas if they had more experienced technical talent (say people who have worked on highly scalable software at google or microsoft or whoever for 5 years) who have already "seen some shit", they would likely have much higher quality at a fraction of the development time.

(And while the salaries for experienced folks would have to be higher per employee, they could get by with a lot less of them and still have better code).