I have a deep feeling that i can “do it myself”, yet i work for companies because deep down I like the anonymity and the safety of it; at a big company we get to be part of something established, we don’t have to show our own faces to the world.

Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.

FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH

examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...

(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)

It’s just a trace, but the following paragraph (quoted in part) hits hard in this season of thanks and bounty. Thank you, Fred K, for writing it.

> The business has been a giant blackpill on Temu. Seeing people pay my mom to throw away bags full of internet purchases has been depressing. Bringing yet cheaper goods into the States hasn’t actually increased quality of life whatsoever over the already cheap goods on Amazon[. . . .] Unfortunately — despite the very real benefits that mass affluence and consumer culture have, it’s difficult in my position to not think that we’ve gone too far.

Thing is, working as a cog in a larger machine is itself another form of reality check. Both situations force you to confront data and perspectives that aren't your own, and to adapt to them. Reading through the comments here, I find myself resonating with folks who very much enjoy being cogs or have a desire to run a smaller business for themselves, profit-motives and moat-building be damned. Almost as if there's a desire to return to a simpler market devoid of the complexities that computers have allowed to thrive (algorithmic pricing, big data analysis, surveillance capitalism, etc), where what mattered was running a good environment with fair pricing rather than grandiose plans for expansion or market monopolization. I empathize with those goals, given my "fuck you money" pie-in-the-sky plans of running a small makerspace/net cafe in a community and eating the modest loss through ROI elsewhere in my investments.

To get back to the (still-down) article, running a business absolutely means confronting the reality of the fickleness of the marketplace. It means dealing with customers who are ill-informed and also ill-suited to critique or correction. You have to make a product others want to buy, rather than one you believe is best. The pressure is there to capitalize on every avenue, every opportunity, never turning down business for fear of it reverberating into collapsing other opportunities. It's a really immediate reckoning over what's more important to you in terms of success vs ethics, in an environment incredibly hostile to the latter (and exploitative of those who reside on that side of the proverbial fence). It's stressful, and it's why I refuse to open my own shop despite my dissatisfaction with corporate life at present.

Technologists want to change the world to be how they envision the world.

These are fundamentally at odds but modern business requires both to operate successfully.

One click later, "Error establishing a database connection". HN seems to have hugged this guy's site to death.