People love to talk about how tech is the wave of the future and how everyone needs to be involved in planning how we will get more done with fewer resources. In truth, most technoligarchs have already bought the media, and they pay people to expound on their “goodness.” As a native Austinite, nothing about the tech industry has not been bigoted, overblown, or destructive to the city, and this is the same way as the industry itself. For a brief moment, I worked for a start-up, and I can tell anyone who asks that this type of scam is common, not rare, and people need to pay attention to the personalities of those who ask people to work for free for the idea of money.
The president told us in the opening meeting that we would be working for no money without the prospect of money in sight, and still considered that he was offering us the opportunity of a lifetime. With startups, the reality is that they are looking for income, and only if someone else is impressed with their company will money ever be offered as compensation. A former acquaintance of mine worked for a company and ended up getting $75,000 when the company went public. Only for that reason did I believe that there was a chance that I could be compensated in the long run. However, when the president and CEO later stated that they would only go public if they felt “comfortable” with the “product,” I knew I had been scammed. Nevertheless, I stayed for two months under the belief that someone else would see that we were all working, and pay for that work.
More than anything, the executives kept repeating how everyone needed to be “aligned,” which eventually implied that they were using repetitive language based on the idea of a product. The entire time I was there, I never saw a product, so I will never know what, if anything, was actually being built. Working for a tech startup seemed to demand living in delusion, and with a crazy federal administration, I could only handle living in the mind of madmen for a couple of months. No one would openly admit that they had no product to sell, and eventually the executives’ cheap mindset was hit with the reality that tools needed to be purchased for a product to even be created.
The biggest problem with both my “job” and most unpaid internships is a refusal to accept that people were becoming financially drained, or that without resources, no one could stay. When I had my own LLC until the end of April 2024, I refused to keep people working “under” me because I had not been able to secure contracts or gain any real income for the project. Operating costs were a bare minimum to me, and I was frustrated when I had to release the programmer because he had a family to feed, even as I had only been working with him for 3-4 months. The company I worked under had secured seed funding, but instead of paying staff, executives were flying all over the world and living in luxury while other people were stuck living with their parents. None of the executives saw anything wrong with this arrangement, and when I did even more research, I saw that one of them had tech experience, and the other did not, which meant only half the team understood how people needed income.
The final straw for me was the demand that more people try and gain money for a lost cause, basically explaining that my team would be filling out information under our own names instead of the executives doing their jobs and securing resources. Pretending that I had a legitimate job with reasonable bosses was one thing, but putting my name on a lie was another, and I refused to do so. Originally, I had planned to work myself into the ground and get all my hours in faster than expected, but once I realized that there was no work because there was no product, and all the executives were high on their own supply, I bailed. There is only so much emotional support that I can provide under professional circumstances, especially without being paid.
The truth is that the CEO was a clown, and the president enabled the behavior instead forcing the clown to go find another circus. For most of the meetings, the bigotry and narcissism was never called out or managed, and the CEO made every single interaction into a production of “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman. Living in someone’s mind for free was not a good professional experience, and I cannot condone that most tech startups operate in this way. Ideally, someone will purchase the company, pay everyone twice what we earned as compensation for unpaid labor, and then immediately shut down the company. Nothing good can come from a team of executives who live in ignorance and refuse to pay anyone but themselves, and in the year 2025, there is no excuse for such behavior.
Three years ago, I helped a corporate recruiter keep a job at Google, and in response, I was emotionally and financially abused. That worker never admitted to incompetence and thought that such a job was a ticket to control all the watchers. In the same way, I understood that there are no real “visionaries” in the tech world, just people who support delusions with other people’s resources. Theoretically, there is a place for rising technology, but not at the expense of both the planet and its inhabitants.
Chasing A Dying Empire 