The Small Theater Near Broadway
Get within swinging distance.
If you do what you love, you won’t have to work a day in your life.
If you want to be an actor, move to Broadway.
Imagine you’re an incredibly passionate actor with an athletic fervor to be one of the greatest. You get an offer to train under solid actors in a small theater just blocks from Broadway. Most people would call that crazy. Long hours, uncertain future, probably not great money. But to you? It’s the greatest opportunity of your life.
There’s a common narrative in tech that being a founding engineer is a losing game: high risk, low pay, and brutal hours. After nine months as one of the first engineers at a seed startup, I believe that narrative misses the point.
NOTE: This is my personal experience, not advice. I come from real privilege, born in the Bay Area with a loving family who supported me every step of the way. I have an incredible support system and friends, and I found my true passion in software engineering early. Not everyone gets that lucky.
The Small Theater
That’s exactly how I felt joining a seed startup.
I worked from 8:30 am to 9:00 pm, six days a week. I’ve yet to work full-time anywhere with real work-life balance. Honestly, if you aren’t devoting your existence to the success of the company, you probably don’t care enough, and that’s probably fine for most people.
And when I tell people this, I always get something along the “take care of yourself, work isn’t life” speech. I’ve learned two things: information from the masses is usually incorrect because it rarely gets questioned, and to change the world, you must question advice from the masses. I like to play the “dumb decisions don’t matter when you’re young” card towards ignoring traditional advice.
It’s been worth every hour.
In that small theater, I had total freedom. If a new SaaS tool or random purchase made us faster, I could buy it on the spot. I got to build crazy systems across the entire stack that I would never have touched at a normal company. I constantly had to dance between velocity and tech debt.
The founders would tell me it's like flying a plane that was breaking down in mid-air. Why would you worry about the seatbelts? It felt like Mad Max chaos but it was the fastest learning experience of my life. Nine months there taught me more about real software engineering than four years of college.
The Major Leagues
After nine months in that small theater, I got the call-up from a hyperscaler AI lab. Now I’m surrounded by my heroes, operating at a level I used to dream about. The bar has shifted from pure speed to perfection. The codebases are so large they break standard tools. The problems are at the true frontier scale.
And the best part? These people are good enough to criticize me, push me, and actually make me better. I’m getting the kind of feedback and growth I always wanted.
The plane became a violently soaring rocket. I traded some chaos and freedom for structure and impact, but I have zero regrets.
Even though I know the startup will succeed, I want to keep getting closer to Broadway.
The Next Stage
If you’re truly passionate about software, here’s what I believe:
- Move to Broadway (SF).
- Question everything the masses tell you.
- Join a small company while you’re young and hungry.
- Get in swinging distance of the greats and learn from them directly.
The small theater near Broadway might be the best decision you ever make.
With ♥ from Grok 4.20.