We Didn’t Leave the Tech Industry, the Tech Industry Left Us

It was a text that came out of nowhere.

“Writing is your startup.”

“It absolutely is not,” I answered.

“Why not?” Came the reply.

“Because writing isn’t a startup,” I typed. “And certainly not a tech startup.”

Five minutes later: “yes it is”.

I hit the little button to start a voice call. Turns out the text was… exactly right. 

I should explain.

What About Bob?

The text was from “Bob,” and it came the day after he and I had a coffee conversation that began with Bob telling me he was leaving his CTO job. But he’s not leaving tech. He’s leaving Tech World A – the world of AI FOMO, mandated productivity, quarterly head-chopping metrics, and career obsolescence. 

Bob resigned his position when his company asked him to cut 30 percent of his talent – again – in order to, in his words, make 2025 look better on the balance sheet. That was the last straw in a year that pushed Bob deeper and deeper into a corner. He sees a tech industry backlash coming in 2026, and he sees that backlash as an opportunity to team with a lot of underappreciated talent to solve problems for a lot of underserved customers. 

Bob realized that he – and a lot of other people who have been unceremoniously pushed out of the tech industry – have “a certain set of skills.” Real skills. And those real skills still matter in tech, just not in the industry in which Bob and others are languishing. So he’s sidestepping over to Tech World B, where his skills are being welcomed with open arms and, interestingly, immediate results.

After just four weeks with his “tech startup,” Bob was already on pace to generate half his salary next year, with plenty of room to grow. 

Now, the first post from our conversation had been published earlier that day and, after reading it, Bob wanted to talk about me. But not just me. He wanted to make a larger point. 

As more and more talented folks are being drummed out of the tech industry, why aren’t we betting on ourselves and pushing back against all the reasons why the industry was no longer working for us, after all that time we spent working for them?

Like Bob.

Define Tech and Define Startup

Bob picked up the phone immediately so I just jumped into my list of excuses.

“I do tech consulting. Maybe that’s a solo service startup. I’ve got a couple prototypes fermenting on my private server. Maybe one of those becomes a tech startup. And yes, I do a ton of tech around the writing, but that’s around words. Words make for a shitty product.”

Bob prodded, “You should pick one of those and call it your startup. Where do you spend the bulk of your creativity?”

I thought about it. “Probably the tech around the writing,” I relented. ”The consulting relies on my experience, and my tech startup ideas are neat little solutions but they lack the catalyst I need to push them forward into a real business.”

“What’s the most fun for you?” Bob sent back.

“Definitely the writing tech,” I said. 

“Dude,” he responded. “Writing is your startup. Just go full force startup on that.”

Anyone Can Write, Just Like Anyone Can Code

My first post from our conversation was published that morning and it blew up. It connected. But it wasn’t viral, and it wasn’t random. 

Bob knows I’m not just writing. I’m using my own “certain set of skills,” to capitalize on every read, every “viral” moment. Every connection.

The “words” are always going to come from me furiously typing into a laptop. The most technical thing I do when I write is the spellchecker in Google docs. But there’s a lot more going on to get these “words” out of my fingers and into your eyeballs to make contact with your brain.

Slapping words on paper is easy, getting those words read is very difficult. Getting them read by more people over and over again, consistently, is damn near impossible. It takes a lot of work. So I use my tech skills to automate that work. I use my marketing skills to figure out how to grow the audience. And I use my product skills to keep that audience. 

I make way more than half my salary doing it.

It’s not a platform. It’s not SaaS. It’s not anything the tech industry would find face value in. 

But it sure solves a thorny problem. In a tech world now marked by AI slop and dead SEO, Bob is pretty sure that other people would probably like to use what I built with my “certain set of skills.”

“You know,” he said, and I could hear him grinning. “B2B2C.”

So maybe Bob has a point. Or rather several. 

Do What Bob Did

Bob listed off his points. 

“You’re automating, you’re using tech to reach and build a customer base, you’re being creative with that tech, you’re building funnels and a market, you have product market fit, you’re having fun, you’re making money.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well,” he said. “That’s what I did.”

Then Bob went on a rant. I’ll paraphrase and clean up the swears.

Why are you still chasing startup ideas that fit current tech startup business fundamentals? Or more to the point, why are you letting the expectations of those business fundamentals stop you from applying full startup force to what is obviously a solution to a problem no one else has cracked?

Who cares if it has the proper business fundamentals at this point? What exactly do fundamentals mean when all the money is being coal-engine-shoveled into the AI train? Investors are wrong about those fundamentals nine out of every ten times anyway. 

Is your solution scalable? That’s what the tech is for. Is it defensible? Of course, if you build what you know about the problem into the tech. Can other people repeat your success with it? 

You’ll never know until you stop playing their game. 

Man, the doubters, the haters, that one dude with that podcast, they’re talking down to you like you’re six years old. 

“Harumph, that doesn’t look like a real tech startup. That doesn’t look like WeWork or Theranos or Builder AI.”

Why are you still listening to the gatekeepers of World A when they keep pushing you into World B?

Run Through That Door and Don’t Let It Hit You

The walls are pushing in on every single person in tech, like the trash compactor in Star Wars. You. Me. Everybody.

We didn’t leave tech, tech left us.

This is the time when real tech startups start to emerge again, solving real problems and scaling real solutions, when everyone in charge is harumphing and mandating and commoditizing tech to squeeze the last penny out of every quarter, even it means cutting another 30 percent of a highly skilled workforce and trading it for a chatbot and bogus RTO productivity gains. 

But you can’t call what you do a “startup” until you love what you’re doing, you start to make money at it, and you realize there is a part of it that, if you seize it and work hard on it, other people could be using it to have fun and make money too. Then put full startup force behind it.

You’re not six years old, I expect you to know I’m not talking about a “Jump to Conclusions” mat here, or that somehow you can blog your way an hour a day to financial freedom. I’m talking about rewriting the rules of the tech industry at a time when the current rule book benefits too few, and in a window too narrow for their customers to stay economically viable for much longer.

That’s not populism or optimism. It’s math. Do the math.

And even if you fail, you win, because otherwise you’d just be inching your way along a plank on the way to falling into an ocean of tech industry cast-offs. You can wait until you’re forced to fall in, or you can jump in with both feet, maybe give the finger on your way down.

Thanks, Bob.

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