Fuck You Startup World

That’s right, I said it.

Fuck your startup scene with your 30 minute morning routines of reading TechCrunch, TNW, Wired, Gizmodo, Mashable, The Verge and ProductHunt- all so you don’t feel ‘left out’. Fuck your weird fucking conversations, things like “OMG did you see Snapchat’s new feature? OMG Instagram is totally copying Snapchat? Did you see Zuck’s live townhall? OMG did you see what Elon Musk tweeted? OMG Uber raised another round!” Fuck that. Nobody cares.

Fuck your crazy work hours. Nobody gives a fuck that Elon musk is working 100 hours a week, and that Marissa Mayer pulling in a 130 hour work week while still breastfeeding her newborns. You’re not Elon Musk- you ain’t Marissa Mayer, you’re not going to get to space, and you won’t build the next Space X. Do me a favor, put your fucking Mac away and go play with your kids.

Fuck your drinking culture too. Please stop celebrating every fucking imaginary milestone with whisky, beer, or pizza and beer. Like, every ‘cool’ company has a bar now? Oh, OK, I’ll come work for you because you have the Glenlivet 17 and not the 15. That’s why I show up to work every day.

Fuck your eating disorders, why the fuck does everything have to be so extreme with you? On one end of the scale you’ve got the pizza-guzzling, office-snack hoarding monster, and on the other end you have the ‘I-must-optimize-every-living-second’ douche that only drinks fucking Soylent. Seriously, what the fuck?

And fuck all those parties after raising money. Don’t you get it? You just dug your grave a little bit deeper. You should celebrate any day that you don’t have to sell off another part of your company.

Fuck your open space floor plans- You really think Zucks builds Facebook’s 2017 roadmap while a nerf war is raging outside? Fuck your standing desk, exercise ball desk, laying desk, and treadmill desk. It ain’t gonna mitigate all those fucking doritos you just munched on, so just shut the fuck up and sit in a normal chair like normal people.

Fuck reading a book a week. No one can read that fast. Let me repeat that -NO ONE CAN FUCKING READ THAT FAST. How about actually reading that god damn book?! Fuck your references to Malcolm Gladwell and Dan Ariely, and stop fucking quoting Lean Startup, for Christs sake. We’ve all fucking read it.

Fuck “entrepreneurs” nowadays, seriously- Everybody is a fucking entrepreneur now. Especially all those straight-out-of-college-entrepreneurs. Just so you know- it’s called “unemployed”. Fuck your bootstrapping, too. Fuck working out of garages and fuck your 2.5 square meters “workspace”. “But hey! At least I can bring my dog to work!”. Fuck you, seriously.

Fuck you productivity freaks. You try to make me feel bad because I woke up “only” at 6AM. Shit, you woke up at 4:30, meditated for 30 minutes, reviewed your quarterly and yearly “goals” for another 30 minutes, and slurped on a delicious Soylent shake while checking daily retention trends. Fuck your noise cancelling headphones and Pomodoro timers, your fucking to-do lists, apps, notes, sticky notes, and God knows what else.

Fuck you for telling me that TV is a waste of time but you’re all about the Netflix and chill. You all fucking watch the same TV shows. Stop fucking talking about how Mr. Robot is kind of like you, because you like to geek out on that shit. You’re just a fucking robot, that’s different. Keep laughing about how HBO’s Silicon Valley is sooooo realistic instead of asking why. But stop fucking telling me to “Always ask Why”.

Fuck you and your stupid interview questions. Who the fuck thinks of these stupid fucking questions? I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life! And I never got a compilation error on a white board, when I need a hash set in Java I just use HashSet- I don’t fucking care about the complexity of this code block because I can afford another EC2 instance! So fuck you.

Fuck your fucking jargon and acronyms. Fucking DAU’s, WAU’s, MAU’s, ARPU, LTV, CPM, CPI, CPC, PPC, CPA, CTR, SEO, ASO, YoY, WoW, Fuck over Fuck. Who the fuck can keep track of all this shit? And the fucking networking events, my fucking lord. Everyone there is the CEO of something-something and they’re all building a MVP to disrupt the who gives a fuck market and that hockey-stick growth is guaranteed.

Fuck the transparency trend, the post mortem and the 5 whys. We can fucking see right through you. Fuck having a Design sprint in EVERY sprint, pushing to production 100 times a day, using no staging environment and building a micro services architecture. Fuck your feature flags and endless variants in your A/B testing. I want to get the same version of your site every time I refresh it, stop fucking changing it up on me.

Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events that cost way too much money, you’re supposed to buy some fucking servers instead! Fuck spending money on ping pong tables that no one ever uses, fucking music rooms, nap rooms, meditation rooms, stress-free rooms, and pilates rooms. Fuck the ridiculous incentives that you give, too. Fuck your unlimited vacation policy, it’s fucking bullshit. We all know that your employees will take less time off.

But more than all, start-up world, fuck you for making me one of you.

Special thanks to Omri Aloni for helping me write this. Fuck you, bro.

Update: this post got lots of traffic and I’m pretty shocked, I wrote about it a bit here.

Photo credit: Rakka, my-effigy via VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND