Confessions of a Former House Negro from the House of Startup

The Hired Gun

I was the hired gun they dropped into the Mariana Trench when the strategy got too deep, too tangled, too hard.
I wasn’t there for the brainstorms or the culture surveys. I was there to get the job done.
They wanted the sausage, not the recipe.
I was the one spinning straw into gold with the unspoken promise of maybe — if I was lucky — getting to hold the thread.

I didn’t belong to the company, but the company sure belonged to me.
My frameworks. My phrasing. My positioning. My insight repackaged, watered down, and pitched as “collaborative.”
I was good enough to borrow from, but never good enough to credit.

And like any well-oiled machine built on illusion, it wasn’t about me. It was never about anyone like me. Just the work we could produce and the stories they could steal.

How Did I Get Here?

When you grow up in a town that takes your culture but rejects you, you learn young:
You are consumable, but not welcome. Admired, but not invited.
Your ideas? Valuable.
Your presence? Inconvenient.

That’s how it starts. You don’t even realize you’ve been groomed for commodification until it’s too late.
You internalize that your worth is tied to what you can produce — not who you are, not how you think, not what you see. Just the output. The polish. The vibe.
And by the time you realize it, you’re already fluent in dilution. Already practiced in shrinking.

Deal with your demons early, kids.
Because if you don’t, they don’t disappear — they get promoted.
They show up in business casual, quoting Brené Brown and asking for “one more iteration.”
They hand you a latte with your own stolen insight on the cup.
And they tell you — with a smile — to be grateful you’re even in the room.

So when I found myself in the House of Startup, it wasn’t unfamiliar. It was just flashier.

The House of Startup

The only glamorous thing about startups is the obscene amount of money funneled into marketing and PR to prop up a lie.
The shinier the pitch deck, the more untaxed capital is being shoveled into the void.

Startups, if we’re honest, aren’t about innovation.
They’re about money parking — a playground for the ultra-wealthy to avoid taxes while pretending they’re funding the next big thing.
They hire a handful of narcissistic “leaders” who are just eccentric enough to seem visionary (until they do something irreparable), and just charismatic enough to convince a wave of bushy-tailed millennials and Gen Xers that they’re “changing the world.”
Spoiler: they’re not.
They’re protecting capital.
And everyone else is incentivized to play along.

Under the thinnest veneer of PNW white-woman feminism and mass-market anti-racism, they bottle up a message of “hope” that usually boils down to:
Gentrify the poor. Displace the working class. But make it look like an app.

You’ll rarely hear anyone say this out loud.
Why would they?
It’s all about “rest and vest, bro.”
(To the uninitiated: that’s waiting for your stock to vest so you can cash out, ideally before the whole thing crashes.)

Speaking out means career suicide.
So instead, they kill others — usually the contractors, freelancers, and “consultants” doing the real work — to keep the machine running.

Let’s not even start on the engineers.
Low-code, no-code, copy-paste keyboard warriors who are more fluent in AWS dashboards than actual architecture.
When it gets hard? They farm it out — usually to offshore teams with real skill and none of the visibility.

And don’t forget the pencil-pushers:
The senior managers who hide behind roadshows, “circle backs,” and endless Google Sheets labeled “WIP.”
(Spoiler: those decks? Made by contractors.)
The strategy? Outsourced.
The ideas? Borrowed.
The culture? Hollow.

They operate in a kind of mythical language — a corporate dog whistle that signals to the room, we’re all the same kind of people here.
99% of the time, they are.
Every now and then, an interloper like me gets in.

And most people play the game.
But to me, prostitution is still prostitution — even when it wears a Patagonia vest and has a mission statement.

Confessions from the Trench

Otherwise known as: receipts.

These aren’t hypotheticals. These are memories with name tags removed.
What follows is a small sampling of what it looks like behind the polished slogans, the keynote slide decks, and the founder LinkedIn threads about “vulnerability” and “building in public.”

• The Chief HR Officer who asked for help simplifying internal leave policies. I said, “Employees just want to know if they can go to the beach.” She laughed, took a note, and later quoted it in a leadership meeting as her own. Same thing with my explanation of psychological safety — stolen bar for bar. When I declined to take on more work outside my already over-bloated scope, I was labeled “resistant to the team spirit.”
• The CMO and General Manager of a wildly visible “digital writing assistant” startup told me my ideas were “interesting but not usable.”
  The following week, they led an all-hands meeting announcing Q2 strategy built entirely on those ideas.
  Of course, no mention of where they came from.
• The CEO who called me “brilliant” in private but introduced me on calls as “our copy gal.” I had written the brand manifesto, half the website, and prepped him for three investor pitches. But sure — copy gal.
• The COO who asked me to “gut check” her LinkedIn post, then published it word-for-word under her name.
  When I mentioned it, I was told I was “reading into things.”
• The Creative Director who borrowed my phrasing for a major campaign, then forgot my name when the press came calling.
  Literally forgot my name.
• The VP of Product who dismissed my insight in a meeting, only to repeat it with a deeper voice and get praised.
  I was asked to take notes.
• Being called passive-aggressive for pointing out that the newly hired content strategist — who also happened to be a reality TV reject — hadn’t bothered to learn how to do her job. I’d been covering her work on top of mine. When I finally said something? I was the problem.
• Watching incompetent senior leaders treat executive roles like collecting Pokémon. That CMO I mentioned earlier? Got fired.
  Then failed laterally to a “snappier” company as Head of Marketing. In tech, execs have a shelf life of about 18–30 months. Don’t believe me? Do your LinkedIn research. I’ll wait.
• A platform that bragged about “building for the greater good” with “top-tier engineers.” Turns out their “native video experience” was just a third-party plugin quietly siphoning user data.
  They got sued.
  Whoops.

Don’t worry — no NDA was harmed in the making of this confession. Just a few illusions.
In tech, exploitation isn’t a glitch. It’s the business model.

Why I Burned the Bridge

Once I woke up and decided I wasn’t going to play small, I left.
Quietly. Cleanly. Probably scared a few folks in the process.
Gone is the precious LinkedIn account, the sparkly portfolio that once vouched for my proximity to challenger brands, consulting giants, and the ever-glossy FAANGs.

To that world, I never existed.
And maybe I never really did — not honestly, anyway.
I was a projection. A strategic whisper. A palatable presence.
Someone they could point to, but never center.

The moment I chose dignity over decorum, the rewards stopped.
No more praise for doing too much with too little.
No more invites to ghostwrite someone else’s genius.
No more space in rooms that only had space for my labor, not my name.

And for a while, I grieved that loss — because erasure has a way of making you question whether you were ever real.
But then I realized: what I lost was a performance.
What I gained was myself.

Let them delete my name from the credits.
Let them pretend I was never there.
The truth doesn’t need a bio.

What I Know Now

One of the most sobering — and anticlimactic — truths I’ve had to reconcile after twelve-ish years in that cesspool is this:
For the right amount of money, comfort, and perceived power, most people have no problem overlooking atrocities.
And I’m not talking about CEOs or tech royalty.
They’re the glittery decoys. There aren’t many of them anyway.

I’m talking about the Kelseys from Idaho, who turn Dogpatch into their whole personality.

Mark from Minnesota, who swears he’s not the son of a tenth-generation dairy farmer, even though everything about him — down to his Patagonia vest and “conscious capitalism” book club — says otherwise.

And Marques, who’ll deny knowing how to play Spades and act like fried chicken is beneath him — like that’s going to get him equity or dignity. (Spoiler: it won’t.)

These are the Judas-incarnate folks who keep the machine running.
Not the kings.
The courtiers.

They’re the ones who’ll gaslight, backstab, and sacrifice anyone who questions the system because they get just enough from it to make betrayal feel like belonging.

Dignity is for sale — they just don’t call it that.
They call it imposter syndrome.
Burnout.
Anxiety.

They’ll hand you a vocabulary of internal blame so you never notice the external theft.
But what they won’t give you is the truth.
That’s a cost they’re unwilling to incur.

What they will do? Rebrand. Monetize. Lie.

Some of the Judases go on to start YouTube channels.
Not to confess — just to pivot.

Suddenly, they’re giving “honest takes” on what it’s like to work in Big Tech,
as if they didn’t spend years silencing, stealing, and stepping over everyone else.

Now it’s Kelsey — who once weaponized her tears in a feedback session — offering “unfiltered” advice on how to be a better manager.

It’s Marcus — who couldn’t be bothered to learn your name — launching a Substack about “navigating corporate trauma.”

It’s Priya — who plagiarized three strategy decks — offering a Notion template bundle for “authentic brand storytelling.”

It’s Darren — whose only claim to fame is failing up — hosting a podcast on “founder resilience.”

They don’t tell the truth.
They simulate it.
Just enough raw lighting and buzzwords to seem authentic —
never enough to be accountable.

They build platforms on counterfeit courage,
then call it a calling.

So I left.
And this letter — this whatever-you-want-to-call-it — is both evidence and indictment.
I won’t be back.
Not because I couldn’t hang.
But because I finally saw what was being hung.

Here’s the silver lining:
Once you realize it’s all a simulation — just a glorified illusion of meaning — you can start living free.
On your own terms.
And yeah, the startup cost is steep.
But honestly?
Can you really put a price on freedom, dignity, and peace?

Didn’t think so.