> You can either be spending your best years being seen as a barely necessary expense in an incompetent bureaucratic place, or spending your best years wasting your life on lottery tickets at a tech startup, or you can be spending your best years destabilizing democracies while greasing the wheels of an ad targeting monster laughing smugly at everyone else especially the cryptocurrency developers, or spending your best years learning how to interview at said ad targeting monster.

There are other options. For example, I've spent the best years of my life on startups building things that are doing good in the world and trying to get them to scale. I haven't had any home runs, but I've helped get a faster acting anti-psychosis drug approved for people with severe schizophrenia, gotten a COVID vaccine approved faster, and now build tools for social workers that have gotten hundreds of people out of homelessness and helped people get out of housing that was making them sick. Despite not yet having a winning startup lottery ticket, that I've made a small positive difference in the world is enough for me, especially because I earn more than enough to have a comfortable life.