Venture-funded companies hire ahead of need. They bring in people to build what the roadmap calls for in six months, to staff the customer success function that will be necessary when growth hits the next threshold, and to fill out a leadership bench that will look credible in the next board meeting. This is not reckless — it is the rational response to having capital that must be deployed and growth expectations that require velocity.

The geographic anchoring of economic opportunity was, for most of human history, a given — you could not participate in the economy of a place without being in the place. The dissolution of this constraint over the past two decades, accelerated dramatically by the pandemic period and the subsequent normalization of distributed work, has created a structural advantage for bootstrapped operators that is still not fully priced into conventional thinking about how to build a business.