It is literally impossible to be a public company CEO or senior manager for that matter, which is the goal of most founders in this sphere, and not be slavishly devoted to maximizing profit margin at all costs and irrespective of anything else. Why? You'll be fired if you're not. Once you're past Sr. Manager you'll be challenged on whether you side with your employees or the stock price. We all know who chooses which.
Want to start a high tech company or even a company with high CAPEX or OPEX entry points? Better get a ton of capital, and guess what, that capital wants ownership because the theory is "they deserve it." The reality is money required to do anything (duh!) and you have no choice, because your broke friends can't afford the 500k you need to hire all those well paid FAANG engineers away.
Fine you say, those are the spoils of victory. Well so here's the problem...if all that money only cares about maintaining the power structures and whitewashing their Rand inspired business sins via "charity" or perhaps "running for president" and that group gets smaller and smaller, what's the rest of folks to do?
I ended up writing about this [1] and now I'm doing everything I can to build or support syndicalist organizations crowding out for-profit investor driven companies.
At this point, tech is just an extension of finance. There's no counter-culture here, it's maximum capitalism and we're ubering humanity off a cliff.
I've stopped trying to be in tech and founded a non-stock democratic cooperative that does residential waste hauling [2,3] and hopefully we'll be picking up trash by July.
I'm about to send out our first mailer to two major residential groups. I'm open to anyone who wants to give us a loan or be hired eventually. andrew@seegull.co