Startup culture Memes

Only in San Francisco would a founding engineer be "vibecoding" at dinner and need the waitress to help debug Claude. This is what happens when you raise $50M in seed funding and convince yourself that work-life balance means bringing your MacBook to a nice restaurant. The founding engineer couldn't even finish their artisanal farm-to-table meal without getting stuck in an AI hallucination loop, so naturally the waitress—who's probably a Stanford CS dropout working on her own stealth startup—had to step in and save the day. The laptop, the water glass, the untouched food, the concerned debugging posture—it's the complete SF tech bro starter pack. Meanwhile, Claude is probably just refusing to write another CRUD app or generate yet another landing page copy. Can't blame the AI for going on strike, honestly.

So you pitch your AI startup to VCs: "We're disrupting the industry with revolutionary machine learning!" They respond: "Cool, here's $50 million in funding to build it." Meanwhile, your actual tech stack is just OpenAI's API with some fancy CSS on top. The entire AI economy is basically investors throwing money at founders who then immediately hand it over to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google for API credits. It's a beautiful circular economy where the only guaranteed winners are the companies actually training the models. The rest of us are just expensive middleware with pitch decks.

Ah, the modern tech hero's journey: "I wrote a prompt, AI generated an API, and now I'm basically the next unicorn founder." Sure buddy, and I once wrote a regex that worked on the first try – doesn't mean I'm Jeff Bezos. The gap between "my AI prompt worked once" and "billion-dollar company" is roughly the same as the gap between "I installed Linux" and "I now run NASA." Those compute bills will hit harder than the reality that prompt engineering isn't the same as actually engineering. Ten years in the trenches and I've learned one truth: the harder someone humble-brags about how easy something was, the more spectacularly it'll explode in production.

The ultimate startup pivot: change one word and suddenly you're worth 10x more to VCs. Remember when we just admitted things were loading? Now our apps are having existential crises while fetching your cat photos. Next week: "contemplating the nature of existence..." while the database query times out. Venture capital flowing in 3...2...1...

The eternal tech industry promise: "AGI is just around the corner! Just need another $20 trillion and we're golden!" Meanwhile, the same AI still can't figure out if there's a bicycle in a CAPTCHA. Silicon Valley VCs keep throwing money into the void like it's a competitive sport, convinced that if they burn enough cash, sentient machines will rise from the ashes. Spoiler alert: your neural network is basically just spicy autocomplete with better PR.

The tech industry's eternal optimism in a nutshell! Companies burning through billions in pursuit of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) with that "we're just one funding round away" energy. It's like watching someone with $5 in their bank account plan their yacht purchase. For context, AGI is the holy grail of AI - machines with human-level intelligence across all tasks - and apparently, we're juuuust $20 trillion short! That's basically pocket change if you check between your sofa cushions, right?