i would be a terrible businessman
if i had a business, i’d be a really bad businessman. like genuinely awful at it lol. and i’ve thought about this enough to know… it’s not a bug, it’s the whole architecture of how i’m wired.
i don’t want to optimize for money. i want to optimize for enjoying the thing. and those two paths diverge way earlier than most people realize.
look at the software i love most in this world. Linux — runs the entire internet. free. FFmpeg — powers every video platform you’ve ever used. free. Blender — goes toe-to-toe with software that costs thousands a year. also free.
and not free as in “you get what you pay for”… free as in this is genuinely better than what most companies charge you a subscription for. these are not toys. these are the backbone of the modern world, made by people who apparently didn’t get the memo that you’re supposed to extract maximum value from your users.
(imagine being the FFmpeg maintainers and knowing that Netflix, YouTube, basically everyone is built on your work… and you just keep going anyway. wild.)
and it goes beyond software. Andrej Karpathy just… puts his lectures out there. for free. the man was head of AI at Tesla and he casually drops world-class deep learning education on YouTube like it’s nothing. and he’s not alone — there are textbooks, courses, entire knowledge systems that brilliant people just gave away because they thought it mattered for the knowledge to exist in the world.
i learned from these people. i learned from their tools. i built with their software. i grew because they chose generosity over gatekeeping.
so now the question becomes… if everything that made me me was given to me freely — why would i turn around and put a price tag on what i make? it doesn’t sit right. it shouldn’t sit right.
the SaaS mindset is genuinely a disease. take something simple. add a login wall. slap a monthly fee on it. call it a “platform.” raise a round. enshittify it over three years. sell. repeat. and somewhere in that cycle you stopped caring about the thing itself and started caring about the metrics around the thing. DAUs. MRR. churn rate. the spreadsheet ate the soul and nobody even noticed.
and oh god… the SaaS founders who claim they’re “building what people actually want” and they’re “having so much fun grinding.” i’ve heard this so many times. i used to buy into it too. took me a while to call it what it is — pure bullshit.
because when you actually look at what they’ve been “building”… it’s slop. just spaghetti slop glued together with unnecessary bloated cloud sewage — seventeen AWS services deep for a glorified CRUD app — all to suck up to customers and investors. shipping features nobody asked for. unnecessary hotfixes just to meet some arbitrary deadline. sprint after sprint of pretending this is engineering.
this is not fun. this is not craft. if you want truly beautiful code, it takes time. you don’t rush it. you sit with it. you take your time and do it at a pace where you can actually think. it’s not a race, goddamnit.
(i say this as someone who lived it. founding engineer at a startup. i’d get pressure to fix broken things within 24 hours. anything longer wasn’t acceptable… you’d get the look. the “why is this taking so long” look. as if careful work is a character flaw. they didn’t care about the code. they cared about the investor update. about the demo. about the number going up.)
there’s no fun in that. there’s no enjoyment. just anxiety dressed up as hustle culture.
…i hope my perspective changes soon, as i meet more people. i genuinely do. maybe there are founders out there who actually mean it when they say they love building. i just haven’t met enough of them yet.
(i’m not saying money is evil or whatever. people gotta eat. bills are real. but there’s a meaningful difference between “i need to sustain myself” and “i need to capture all the value i create and then some.” the first one is human. the second one is the game that eats people alive.)
i’d rather make something good and put it out there. if it helps someone — incredible. if someone builds on top of it — even better. that’s the whole point isn’t it? the knowledge compounds. the tools get better. everyone levels up.
fuck the capitalistic SaaS grindset. FOSS forever.
i’d be a terrible businessman. but i think i’d be a decent human on the internet, and honestly? that sounds way more interesting to me.