Interesting in that I wonder whether government organizations and in particular the highly qualified government members and their functions can be protected in a similar manner from political leaders elected in a democracy.
this could be true that as a different example along the lines of the same conclusion: Women-only medical conditions are less known by medical fields, and there are fewer treatments. Its because the society treats women's lives less seriously. For example pregnancy is still pretty mysterious in general medicine. Birth control pills are to prevent women fertility etc. It could be true that children lives are deemed more important by parents and more researched.
You can compare selling a database to selling git. Nobody is selling git itself, they sell the hosting around the tech, or create a dev workflow (gitlab) that uses git at its core.
If anyone tried to sell git itself it would be impossible. I never used mongodb for reasons listed in the article. But there is free and open source and resilient postgres.
the companies who succeeded around git did not build git. it would be a tough thing to develop both git and the hosting / workflow business around it.
so I guess the lesson to learn is don't try to build extremely sophisticated software as a startup where there are already good enough open source alternatives.
" Starting a company is much harder than you think it is - no matter how hard you think it is; it's harder." This is very true, I wish there was an easier way to start.
I was in your shoes working at a FANG after selling my first company and I quit 2 years ago.
First of all I completely understand that your position bores you to tears. Been there and I know how it feels, especially if you are the type of person who could start a company.
Also, it is hard to connect with a company mission. All company missions boil down to just serving users and making money.
I wanted to quit and start a company all the time.
The fact is though, startups are really really hard to pull off. I came to realize this after building several, completed, shipped, but non-monetized projects after quitting.
Especially if you are at a FANG, probably where you live is also not that cheap. And given the loss of income, you will eventually come to a point of struggle where you are both not making money and trying to bring up a really-hard-to-bring-up startup project.
I'd say that is the surprise. Lifestyle-wise though, it has been awesome. E.g. Your entire day is not programmed by somebody else and telling you what to do. Be creative as you wish. Truly follow your dreams (the projects I built were my dreams and glad I did them). Do a workout any time of the day when you feel like to, these have been great, and my stress level has been lower.
You need to figure out how to make money though, and that's not easy if you plan on doing a startup.