Eventually I think life stagnates. Working for a unicorn had its downs, but there's just something about working with people smarter than me. One thing I just hate about social media is having to explain everything. HN seems to get me, but not quite. In a top tier tech company, there would probably be 6 or so people who have done the same thing you're doing. And you can just sit around for hours debating the best way to design a table to store currencies and be paid a good sum for it. We can talk about insane things like testing in production, getting rid of feature flags, getting rid of documentation. Or just dumb things like Wordle solving algorithms. Someone will not only get it, they'd indulge you on it. But you'd need to hire some of the smartest people in a region and force them all to join the same Slack.