> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven

The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.

I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.

I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.

> The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add.

This hits close to home. A promising startup I joined hired a cluster of people who wanted to do nothing other than grow their headcount and play hardball politics all of the time. The VP of Product had hired 20 people and spent a year building a “product decision framework” and he still couldn’t answer the question about what we were going to build.

The strangest part for me was that it was all so obviously broken but it persisted anyway. There were some factions that emerged where the underperforming VPs banded together to support each other and attack anyone who spoke out about their obvious problems.

It was easier to be "mission-driven" back when startups could just spend investor money like it was water, chasing maximum growth over profit. But nowadays startups have to chase profitability at the expense of all else.

> Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak

... or how beneficial it could be for your entire company and customers. Think about how well regarded gabe newel is and the resulting longlevity of valve.

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