Tech Economics

A small startup doubled its engineering team and watched velocity drop. The math behind why is older than software itself.

Raising a big round feels like winning. It often isn't. Here's the mechanism by which excess capital turns into a company's undoing.

The XZ Utils backdoor came within days of compromising most of the world's Linux servers. The real story is how close it came to working.

The best platform rarely wins. The one with the best distribution does. This pattern has repeated so often it's basically a law of tech economics.

The math on elite engineering talent looks wrong until you account for what slow, mediocre work actually costs.

Open source projects can generate real revenue and still get passed over by investors. The reasons are structural, not accidental.

The zero marginal cost of software distribution is real. The zero exit cost is a myth that companies discover only when they're already trapped.

The 10x engineer is real. So is the damage they cause. Here's why bringing on a singular genius often slows down everyone else.

Fixing a bug and understanding it are two different skills. Most engineering culture rewards the first and ignores the second.

The gap between what engineers earn and what salespeople earn isn't random. It's a direct consequence of how markets price visibility over impact.

Ask five engineers what a system cost to build and you'll get five different numbers. That's not a rounding error. It's a structural problem with how software cost gets measured.

Technical superiority rarely determines which platform dominates a market. The winners play a different game entirely.

Market leaders set the agenda and pay for it. The second-biggest player collects the rewards without the bill.

The people who maintain the code that runs most of the internet are mostly volunteers. The companies that depend on that code are not.

A product making money is not always a product worth keeping. Here's the cold logic behind why companies shut down software that works.

Market leadership looks great on a press release. It costs a fortune in practice. The economics of being number two are quietly superior.

Speed is measurable. Judgment isn't. That's why companies keep optimizing for the wrong thing when they hire engineers.

The license costs nothing. The engineering hours, security patches, and operational expertise will cost you plenty. Here's what the download page doesn't tell you.