Anxiety

Are you escaping the "permanent underclass?" Let's talk about it.

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Hey friends,

I can’t stop thinking about this post.

I had a 1am moment last week where I genuinely asked myself if I had moved to the wrong city.

I’m two months into San Francisco, fresh from Singapore, and I’ve had the same dinner conversation three times now. Different people, same shape. Smart, accomplished, the kind of person who would be a star anywhere else in the world — sitting across from me doing math in their head about whether they got into the wrong building five years ago.

Then this post from Deedy at Menlo Ventures went viral and I realized it wasn’t just my table.

read this, its worth it

His diagnosis is brutal and simple. Over the last five years, ~10,000 people across Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Nvidia, and a handful of AI startups have reached retirement wealth, north of $20M. Everyone else, even people on well-paying engineering salaries under $500k, is quietly doing the arithmetic on whether they’ll ever get there. Layoffs are happening.

Engineers are watching the skill they spent a decade sharpening get commoditized in a year.

One line stopped me:

“The corporate ladder looks like the wrong building to climb.”

The wrong building.

I keep turning that over.

Because I don’t think what’s rattling people is the divide — divides have always existed. Google minted millionaires in 2004. Crypto did it in 2013. The rest of us survived being adjacent to them.

What’s new is that the scoreboard itself has consolidated. For this moment in SF, there is one game that counts. You’re inside the lab, or you’re outside it. You have liquid millions, or you have a story about why you don’t. Everything else — your craft, your company, your reputation — gets quietly reweighted overnight.

And here’s the part I’m still sitting with: I moved here on conviction. I run a mentorship platform. I believe the most underrated people in tech are the ones building things that don’t 10x on a cap table but compound on a generation.

I still believe that.

But two months in, in this city, on a Tuesday at 1am, that belief is harder to hold than it was in Singapore.

“If you're stuck in the Bay Area tech rat race/psychosis, make time to travel to other places.

Go to a small town in Europe or visit Asia - you'll see that life can be about much more than whether you're IC7 or IC8 or what company you work for.

Don't be the person to put on your tombstone: "He got divorced and neglected his kids, but at least he made D2 at FAANG."” - Peter Yang

So I want to ask you, and I really mean it:

Did Deedy’s post hit you?

If you’re inside the bubble — what does it actually feel like in there? Is it as good as the outside imagines?

If you’re outside it, like most of us — are you climbing harder, switching games, or quietly wondering if you’re in the wrong building too?

I’ll read every comment. Let’s discuss. 🧠

Felix