if i ever ran a business i’d be terrible at it. genuinely awful lol. the problem is i don’t want to optimize for money, i want to optimize for actually enjoying the thing i’m doing, and those two goals stop pointing the same direction way sooner than people admit.
think about the software i love most:
- Linux runs basically the entire internet. free.
- FFmpeg powers every video platform you’ve ever touched. free.
- Blender holds its own against tools that cost thousands a year. also free.
free as in freedom, to be clear. and the funny part is this stuff is lean and well-built, while a lot of the paid bloated slop that literally runs on top of it can’t be bothered to fund it, or tosses the maintainers a few peanuts and calls it generosity.
not every company is like that. some actually get it. Zerodha, Valve, Valorant, Winrar, a handful of others.
but seriously, picture being an FFmpeg maintainer. you know Netflix and YouTube and pretty much the whole industry is standing on your work, and you just keep shipping anyway. that’s wild to me.
and this isn’t only a software thing. Andrej Karpathy just posts his lectures online for free. the guy ran AI at Tesla and he drops world-class deep learning courses on YouTube like it’s no big deal. and he’s far from the only one. there are textbooks and courses and whole bodies of knowledge that smart people simply gave away because they decided it mattered more for the thing to exist than for them to own it.
i learned from these people. i used their tools, i built on their software, i got better because they picked generosity over gatekeeping.
so here’s where it lands for me. if almost everything that shaped me was handed to me for free, why would i slap a price tag on whatever i make next? it doesn’t sit right with me, and honestly i don’t think it should sit right with anyone.
the SaaS playbook is kind of a sickness. take something simple, wall it behind a login, charge a monthly fee, call it a “platform,” raise a round, slowly make it worse for three years, sell, do it again. and somewhere in there you stopped caring about the actual thing and started caring about the numbers wrapped around it: daily actives, recurring revenue, churn. the spreadsheet quietly ate the soul of the product and nobody flinched.
and god, the founders who insist they’re “building what people really want” while “having a blast grinding.” i’ve heard that line a hundred times. i believed it once too. it took me a while to just call it bullshit.
because when you look at what actually got built, it’s slop. spaghetti held together with way too much cloud plumbing, seventeen AWS services deep for what is honestly a CRUD app, all of it bent toward impressing customers and investors. features nobody asked for. panic hotfixes to hit some made-up deadline. sprint after sprint of cosplaying as engineering.
that’s not fun and it’s not craft. good code takes time. you don’t sprint through it, you sit with it, you work at a pace where you can actually think. it isn’t a race no matter how badly someone wants it to be.
(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 joy in working that way. it’s just anxiety wearing a hustle-culture costume.
i hope that view of mine softens as i meet more people, i really do. maybe there are founders who genuinely mean it when they say they love building. i just haven’t run into enough of them yet.
and to be fair, i’m not saying money is evil. people have to eat, bills are real. but there’s a real gap between “i need to sustain myself” and “i need to capture every bit of value i create and then some.” the first is just being human. the second is the game that chews people up.
i’d rather make something decent and put it out there. if it helps someone, great. if someone builds on top of it, even better. isn’t that the whole point? the knowledge stacks up, the tools improve, everyone gets a little further along.
fuck the capitalstic SaaS grindset. FOSS forever.