The Winner Takes It All

I. The Founding Legend

Every startup has a founding legend. It always sounds roughly the same: two, three, four people meet — in a garage, a shared flat, a coworking space. They have an idea, passion, and nothing to lose. They work day and night, they risk everything, they believe in their vision. And then, after years of sacrifice, comes the breakthrough: an investor, a customer, an exit. The story ends with an IPO, champagne, and the sentence: "We made it."

What the legend conceals is the pronoun. Who exactly is "we"? And what exactly has "we" achieved? For as a rule, what stands at the end is not a team that won together, but a single person who got everything — and several others who watched as the results of their work changed hands.

The winner takes it all. The rest get an anecdote.

II. The Division of Roles

In every startup there is an invisible hierarchy that has nothing to do with org charts and job titles. It follows a single rule: whoever holds the connection to the outside holds the power in the end.

There is the engineer who builds the product. They understand the technology, they solve the problems, they sit at their computer at night when the others are asleep. Without them there would be nothing to sell. But they have a weakness: they understand their product better than the market, and they trust that quality will prevail.

There is the salesperson who brings in the customers. They talk where the engineer calculates. They promise where the engineer doubts. They sell visions while the engineer writes specifications. They bring the money that keeps the company alive — and they know that money is the language everyone ultimately understands.

There is the third person — sometimes a founder, sometimes someone who joined later — who has the connections. To the investors. To the bank. To the lawyer. To the tax adviser. To the advisory board. To the one decision-maker who approves the big contract. They build nothing, they sell nothing, but they know everyone who matters. And they know how contracts work.

In the founding phase, when everyone is equally poor and equally enthusiastic, these roles seem equivalent. Everyone needs everyone. But as soon as money enters the picture — real money, from outside — the tectonics shift. And they always shift in the same direction.

III. The Mechanics of Displacement

The displacement does not begin with a coup. It begins with a contract.

The first investor wants assurances. They want a business plan, milestones, a governance structure. They want to know who is in charge. And they want — naturally — to talk to someone who speaks their language. Not the language of technology, not the language of the product, but the language of money: returns, valuation, exit strategy, dilution, liquidation preference.

The engineer does not speak this language. Not because they are stupid, but because they possess a different kind of intelligence — one that concerns itself with solving problems rather than distributing proceeds. They sign the contract that the connection man has negotiated, because they trust him and because they want to get back to work.

In this contract stands everything that will later happen. The shares. The vesting clauses. The good-leaver/bad-leaver provisions. The drag-along rights. The anti-dilution rules for the next financing round. These are terms the engineer hears for the first time and understands for the last, because they have other things to do — the product still doesn't work properly, and the investor wants results in six months.

Six months later, the product works. And the contract works too — just for someone else.

IV. The Currency of Connections

In classical economics there are three factors of production: labour, land, capital. In the startup economy there is a fourth that dominates all others: connections.

Connections are the hardest currency in the founding ecosystem. They determine who gets money and who does not, who is allowed at the table and who stays outside, who dictates the terms and who accepts them. The engineer may have developed the most brilliant product in the world — if they know no one who will write a cheque, their product does not exist.

This asymmetry is no accident. It has grown. The network of capital is exclusive because exclusivity is its business model. Venture capitalists do not invest in ideas — they invest in founders they know, who are recommended by people they know, who attended the right conferences, who went to the right universities, who were in the right accelerator programmes. The network reproduces itself, and it selects by a criterion that has nothing to do with the quality of the idea: belonging.

The connection man in the startup has belonging. The engineer has an invention. Both are valuable, but only one gets paid.

V. Oppenheimer's Distinction, Revisited

Franz Oppenheimer distinguished the economic means — one's own labour and voluntary exchange — from the political means — the appropriation of other people's labour. In the startup, it becomes apparent that the boundary between the two is more fluid than Oppenheimer might have imagined.

The engineer works with the economic means: they create something that did not exist before. The connection man works — with what, exactly? They create nothing new. They build nothing. They invent nothing. What they do is: establish access. Open doors. Exploit asymmetries in their own favour. They position themselves between the creator and the market — exactly as capital does in the first essay of this series.

One could argue that intermediation is also an economic service. That the connection man creates value by bringing supply and demand together. This is true — up to the point where the compensation for intermediation exceeds the compensation for creation. When the intermediary gets more than the creator, intermediation has ceased to be a service. It has become the political means.

In the startup world, this transformation occurs with reliable regularity. And no one calls it by its name, because all parties speak the same language — the language of "partnership", "shared vision", "we".

VI. The Exit Arithmetic

When the startup is sold or goes public, the arithmetic reveals what language had concealed.

There are the liquidation preferences: the investor gets their money back first, before anyone else sees anything. If the company is sold for less than the sum of investments, the founders walk away empty-handed — even if they worked for years at a below-market salary.

There are the dilutions: in every financing round, the founders' share decreases. The engineer who started with 33 per cent may hold just eight after the third round. The connection man, who negotiated the rounds, has ensured that his own shares are protected by anti-dilution clauses — a detail that somehow got lost the night before the signing.

There are the vesting clauses: if the engineer "voluntarily" leaves the company — perhaps because they realise that their role is being increasingly marginalised — their unvested shares are forfeit. Four-year vesting, one-year cliff, then monthly vesting, acceleration only upon change of control: terms that are read aloud at the notary's office and that the engineer nods through, because the connection man says: "That's standard."

Standard. The word with which every structural injustice is normalised.

VII. The Pattern Behind the Pattern

One could now tell stories. Everyone who has ever worked in a startup knows at least one. The brilliant programmer who stayed with the company until it was sold, only to discover that their options were worth nothing after the investor's liquidation preference. The founder who was pushed out of her own company after the Series B because the new investor wanted a "more experienced CEO" — and the more experienced CEO happened to be the connection man. The CTO who learned after the exit that the CFO had a special arrangement no one knew about.

But the stories obscure the pattern. And the pattern is the same as in the first essay: the creative mind creates the value, and capital — here in the guise of the connection man — skims it off. Not through fraud, not through violence, but through contract design, information advantage, and control over the relationship to money.

The connection man need not be a bad person. They need not be a fraudster, a manipulator, a cynic. They need only understand how contracts work better than the engineer does. They need only sit closer to the money than to the product. They need only do what the system rewards: not create, but distribute — and in the distribution, not forget themselves.

VIII. Why It Stays This Way

The system reproduces itself because it rests on a false narrative: the narrative of risk.

The standard justification runs: whoever risks more deserves more. The investor risks their money. The connection man risks their reputation. Therefore they are entitled to higher returns than the engineer, who "only" risks their time.

But this calculation is wrong. The investor risks money they already have — and if they diversify, they can lose it in nine out of ten cases as long as the tenth case pays enough. Their risk is calculated, spread, tax-deductible. The connection man risks their reputation — but their reputation grows with every deal, whether the deal was good for everyone involved or not. Whoever has brokered three startups to investors is considered experienced, not failed, even if the founders lost their life's work in the process.

The engineer, by contrast, risks something no actuary can calculate: their creative energy, their best years, their health, their relationships, their chance to bring the one idea they have into the world. If the startup fails or if they are pushed out, they have not merely lost money — they have lost time that will not return, and a part of themselves that resides in the product that now belongs to someone else.

But this risk is invisible, because it cannot be expressed in euros. And what cannot be expressed in euros does not exist in the language of capital.

IX. The Blind Spot of Startup Culture

Startup culture has no language for this problem. It has myths instead.

The myth of the brilliant founder who unites everything in one person — vision, technology, sales, finance — and who therefore deserves total control. In reality, very few founders are brilliant at everything. Most are brilliant at one thing and dependent in all others. The myth serves to make the concentration of control appear natural.

The myth of meritocracy, in which the best wins. In reality, the best-connected wins. These are not the same, even though startup culture permanently conflates them. Whoever pitches at the right demo day gets money. Whoever pitches at the wrong one gets applause. The difference lies not in the quality of the pitch but in the quality of the address book.

The myth of "we're all in this together". In reality, some are more in it than others. The intern who works for options that are worth nothing after dilution is not "in this together" with the founder who drew a special dividend from the bridge financing. But both wear the same T-shirt.

X. Oppenheimer's Solution, Applied

Franz Oppenheimer identified monopoly as the root of the political means. In the startup, the monopoly is called: access.

As long as access to capital is monopolised — through closed networks, through the exclusivity of the venture capital scene, through the information asymmetry between those who make contracts and those who make products — the winner will take it all. Not because they deserve to, but because the structure provides for it.

The solution does not lie in training better founders — although it does no harm for engineers to learn to read contract law. The solution lies in opening access: transparent financing terms instead of proprietary term sheets. Standardised and fair equity models instead of "standard" clauses that always favour the same side. Cooperative founding models in which shares are tied to contribution, not to proximity to money.

Until that happens, the startup world will remain what it has always been beneath its colourful surface: a mechanism in which creative energy flows from the bottom upwards — and money flows from the top upwards.