Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core strategy was replaced. But I was early in my career and excited to be working in the VC tech-startup world. I ended up making my life in the US, so this was a pretty pivotal phase in my life. For a while I lived the start-up life: building rapidly and playing Foosball 1 . GenieDB actively rejected revenue opportunities ( a la Silicon Valley ) with the aim of getting acquired for pioneering technology. We limped along for years with never more than 3 customers, even when big-tech and eventually open-source did what we tried to do better than us. I left with mixed feelings and eventually came to realize we never had the serious footing it would have taken to actually develop significant technology.…