Tech Economics

Hiring cheap engineers feels financially responsible. It usually isn't. Here's the math most engineering managers refuse to do.

First-mover advantage is one of the most persistent myths in tech. The data and the history both point the other way.

Lines of code is a seductive metric. It's also almost completely backwards as a measure of engineering value.

Winning a tech market sounds great until you see the cost structure. The company in second place is often running a much better business.

Market leadership costs more than it pays. The economics of tech competition reward the company just behind the leader more than the leader itself.

The people who build the products that generate billions rarely capture much of that value. The structure is intentional, not accidental.

The number sounds transformative. The reality is more specific, and more instructive.

Being first is expensive, uncertain, and frequently fatal. The companies that dominate markets are often the ones that watched someone else make all the mistakes.

Picking a mid-tier cloud plan to save money often triggers hidden costs that exceed what the premium option would have charged you. Here's why.

The decision process inside venture capital firms looks nothing like founders imagine. Here's what actually happens to your deck.

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.