It's a tale of two cities, in my experience. Much like you, I'm sick of wasting away the best years of my life doing nothing of consequence at $ENTERPRISE and I'm willing to take a 20% pay cut at this point for a chance to actually ship things at a small company.

Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills you need in the jungle are very different from the ones you need in a zoo, and they feel I've spent too much time in a zoo.

Similarly, large companies want to hire people who understand the value of processes and hierarchies, and interviewing at these places is a challenge for those who have spent most of their career in startups.

> I'm willing to take a 20% pay cut at this point for a chance to actually ship things at a small company.

Unfortunately the pay cut might be a lot bigger than 20%. I've seen people have "the same job" where one gets paid $300k p.a. at FAANG and another $60k at a small company (while getting a lot more done).

> Unfortunately, I've found that describing what I've learned over the past three years (without any negativity) gives founders the ick. The survival skills you need in the jungle are very different from the ones you need in a zoo, and they feel I've spent too much time in a zoo.

Try describing where you want to be and not so much where you have been.

By that, I mean when interviewing with smaller organizations, pick out the things you have learned which would be beneficial to a much lesser funded effort. For example:

  - automated builds are repeatable
  - unit/feature/integration tests translate to lower costs
  - too many layers of management stifles progress
  - <insert other lessons you have learned here>