Unfortunately I actually LOLd when I got to that point in the essay. It was not a surprise.

If being an SV founder or VC requires nonconformism, it's a very mainstream kind of nonconformism which has been part of the culture since the 1940s. (By some accounts, even earlier.)

IMO you cannot seriously claim to be a nonconformist if you unquestioningly accept and promote the framing of a game and a set of rules which have been in place for decades now.

Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options.

> Real nonconformists will be asking why the Internet seems to have been turned into the plaything of a handful of gigantic stagnant bureaucracies, why the VC system seems determined to generate more of these bureaucracies, and whether maybe there are more creative and performant options.

Jaron Lanier comes to mind.

I'm of the opinion that the non-conformists these days are the people that think capitalism shouldn't exist at all and choose to minimize their role in it as far as they can without starving and going homeless.

You have to justify getting all that money for doing something that's ultimately not that important for society somehow.

You mean "getting people to click on ads" isn't deeply meaningful to society? Perish the thought!

It would be interesting to come up with the "tech" archetypes.

The coder with a thousand faces, a modern day adaptation of Joseph Campbell[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces