Totally agree with this. The narrative shows up in more discussions than just startup vs bigco; it&#x27;s also a very common decisionmaking framework when choosing first jobs out of college, when choosing projects to work on while at the company, etc.<p>It&#x27;s pretty bad overall for net societal productivity. The main reasons this framework shows up so much is that (i) it&#x27;s hard to really think through what kind of unique value one offers and to figure out how to leverage it, and (ii) it&#x27;s tough psychologically to do something that doesn&#x27;t optimize for the typical value function (prestige + income).