Tech Economics

Hiring the lower-salary engineer feels like saving money. The math usually says otherwise.

Acqui-hires are structured to reward the acquiring company, not the startup's shareholders. Here's what actually happens to your stake.

Being first earns you a footnote. Being second, with better timing and someone else's proof of concept, often earns you the market.

AMD spent years losing the CPU war. Then it became one of the most profitable chip companies on the planet. The math behind why second place wins.

The engineers who maintain legacy systems earn more than those building greenfield projects. This isn't a market inefficiency. It's the market working correctly.

Clients pay six times what a junior engineer earns per hour. That gap isn't greed or inefficiency. It's a rational pricing structure most people misread.

Being first sounds like a massive advantage. Historically, it often isn't. Here's the economics of why followers beat pioneers.

Market leadership sounds like a financial win. The economics behind it often tell a different story.

A senior engineer costs three times as much as a junior one. At one fintech startup, the math worked out decisively in the expensive hire's favor.

The software stack under every major tech company is largely built on unpaid or underpaid volunteer work. Here's what that actually costs us.

Being first sounds like an advantage. In practice, it mostly means paying for everyone else's education.

The license costs nothing. The operations, security, talent, and maintenance costs will surprise you. Here's what actually happens after you adopt.

The sticker price on cloud compute is almost never what you actually pay. Here's what gets added after you sign up.

Being the market leader sounds like winning. The economics often tell a different story.

AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud don't compete on price. They compete on making price comparison so difficult that you stop trying.

Salary is a line item. The actual cost of an engineer is what happens when you get the decision wrong in either direction.

Power law math means a single outlier company can return an entire fund. The uncomfortable truth is that outlier is usually the one the partnership debated cutting.

Open source maintainers collectively produce software worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The vast majority earn nothing for it. That's not sustainable, and the industry knows it.