You Didn't See It Coming
24 Sep, 2025
It started with the hiring posts.
A friend, call him Dev, began writing on LinkedIn and Twitter/X about his intentionally small team. How they moved faster, knew each other deeply, avoided the bureaucracy that kills startups. His posts got traction. The story felt authentic because, at the time, it was.
What I knew, and his followers didn't, was simpler. Dev couldn't hire. His runway was tight, his equity offers weren't competitive, and the candidates he wanted kept choosing better-funded competitors. The small team wasn't a philosophy, it was a constraint.
A year later, the layoff headlines started. Big tech cutting thousands, venture-backed startups imploding, bloated teams getting slashed. Suddenly, Dev's posts multiplied. Thoughtful threads about choosing culture over rapid growth, the wisdom of staying lean. He wrote about how he'd "always believed in sustainable team building and praised his foresight in avoiding the growth-at-all-costs trap.
I watched this transformation with fascination. Dev had become the prophet of his own past.
Source:Internet
I started noticing it everywhere. The founder who couldn't afford an office now posts about remote-first culture. The one who couldn't hire senior engineers writes threads about growing talent from within. The startup that stayed in their home market because international expansion was too expensive now shares insights about deep local expertise over global sprawl.
We've all become heroes of our carefully edited stories.
... continue reading