🔗 Your Entire Startup Is a Single Checkbox

Man, the proliferation of cloud technologies has really fucked us. There's a startup for everything. Your product's login page is an entire separate startup. Its environment variables are managed by another startup. Feature flags are managed by a startup. The system's logs are sent to yet another startup. Your data are stored at some other startup. Search functionality is relegated to a different startup. That just-to-say-you-have-it AI feature comes from another startup. The system sends notifications through another startup. You integrate with other startups via a startup. You deploy the product through one or more startups. Your stale, illegible documentation is provided via one more startup. You secure the product with one, two or maybe six other startups. You communicate with customers through a bunch of other startups. Your developers store files at that other startup.

Where does it end?! What does your product even do?! Will we not be satisfied until every single line of code in our products is an API call to another startup? All of these startups could have been, nay, should have been just a library. But because they're startups that raised millions of dollars from insatiable Venture Capitalists, they have to bloat their products to gargantuan proportions. More features that don't work, more fake AI stuff, more authentication mechanisms, more OTP codes, more text messages, more UIs, more charts in the UI, more JavaScript libraries that slow the UI down to dial-up modem speeds, more integrations, more checkboxes, more emails, more tracking, more data collection, more APIs, more developers, more salespeople, more, more, MOAR!

But don't worry, one day, after you've already raked in a few millions from those series B and above investors (I swear it's not a Ponzi scheme), your startup will be bought. It will exit the market. And all those screens in the UI, all those pages in the documentation, all those GitHub workflows, all of that will be relegated into what it always should have been - a single fucking checkbox in the product of the company that bought you.

Probably not even that.