The last engine of social mobility
Two things made me write this.
First: I was rewatching Hamilton, and this line hit me:
"I'm joining the rebellion 'cause I know it's my chance
to socially advance, instead of sewin' some pants!”
It’s from the song My Shot. Mulligan sees war (as brutal and unfair as it is) as his one shot to rise above his station.
That line made me pause. So I looked it up, was war really one of the few paths to upward mobility in the past?
Turns out, yes.1
Some of Napoleon’s most famous marshals and generals, such as Jean Lannes, André Masséna, Michel Ney, and Louis-Alexandre Berthier, rose to prominence during the Revolutionary Wars. That period shook up the old order just enough for talent to matter more than titles. For once, people could rise based on what they did, not where they came from.
In a system designed to keep people in place, chaos cracks open mobility.
Second: I was watching an interview with Peter Thiel. When asked what advice he’d give to ambitious young people, he said:
"For the last 25-30 years, tech - meaning computer science, software, internet, mobile internet, and now crypto & AI - has been the vector of progress in our society. This is where you can do new things. This is where you can build new companies. Almost everything else is stale, sclerotic, and extremely malthusian in practice. So I would tell people to go into tech."
In other words: tech is the last engine still moving.
Both moments stuck because they point to the same truth, in the past, social mobility came through war.
Today, for many of us, it comes through tech.
And how does tech manifests?
Through startups.
That’s been true in my own life. I don’t come from a tech background. In fact, after seven years of building credibility in a totally different field, I got a solid job offer, one that most would take. But I turned it down. The ceiling felt low. Even at the time (I was 22) my intuition told me I can do more. So I pivoted into tech, and it changed everything.
Let me explain why I think startups, especially early-stage ones, might be the only real shot left at fast social mobility.
Most industries are stable by design. Startups are not.
Thiel’s point is worth highlighting. Most sectors, law, finance, medicine, academia, aren’t built to reward risk. They’re systems. Stable ones. Optimized for credentialism, not creativity. Progress is linear. You advance by waiting your turn.
Specialization was, and to a large extent still is, a prerequisite for success.
“We live in a homeostatic equilibrium: even the most intelligent and driven people can’t possibly perform every job simultaneously. Stable ecological systems sustain themselves long-term precisely because the apex predator can’t be everywhere at once.”
Gian Segato
If you weren’t born into the right class, the right school, the right network, the climb is slow. It’s like sprinting with ankle weights on.
But startups are different.
“Move fast and break things.”
— Facebook, 2010
Startups break things by design. They exist to challenge the rules, not obey them. That creates openings, cracks where outsiders can slip in.
When the ground is shaking, everyone’s footing is unstable. That’s your window.
If you have nothing to lose and something to prove, you’re built for this. You can take risks the incumbents can’t. That’s your edge.
And most importantly — startups move fast.
Speed matters when you start behind.
If you’re underprivileged, you don’t have 20 years to slowly earn your seat. You need to collapse time.
Startups let you do that.
We often call it “agency”, the willingness to act without permission.
“You can just do things.”
— Sam Altman
People with high agency gravitate towards startups.
Not because they’re easy, quite the opposite. But because they’re nonlinear. One product, one idea, one correctly timed launch, and your trajectory changes.
The odds are against you. But the possibility of escape velocity exists.
It exists because most startups are low-structure, high-impact environments with an opportunity for assymetric upside.
That’s rare. And it matters.
Are startups fully meritocratic? No. But they’re closer than anything else.
VC still favors pedigrees. Warm intros still matter. Your name and your network still tilt the board.
But even so, output counts.
A friend of mine left a great job in NYC finance to build a startup. When we were discussing why, he put it like this:
“I feel startups are amazing for people who want to compete at the highest level, but lack the highest level of credentialism.”
Build something people want, and the doors start to open. Distribution beats credentials. Growth beats résumé.
In startups, you get to write your own story. People care about what you’re building now, not the grades you got a decade ago.
If your early life boxed you in, a startup is the fastest way to rewrite your narrative.
And if you win, even modestly, it changes your class, your access, your sense of possibility.
That’s what rising up really means.
Chaos isn’t the ladder. It’s the crack in the wall.
Before writing this, I debated the idea with GPT-4.5. It argued: startups enable outsiders to rise because they create chaos.
It’s not wrong. But chaos isn’t enough.
Chaos creates an opening but what gets you through is relentless, invisible work.
The kind no one sees. The kind that doesn’t trend on Instagram. The kind that’s quiet, disciplined, lonely.
It’s not glamorous. It’s tweaking a landing page. Shipping small features. Debugging something for the 20th time. Waking up every day not to “change the world” — but to just get one more thing to work.
The founder path is often low-status for a long time. You're the person who turned down the safe job. Who’s “still working on that thing.” Who everyone quietly thinks is wasting their potential.
And then, maybe, it clicks.
You’re not a visionary. You’re not a genius. You’re just the one who held on long enough. You stared at the same problem longer than most, and eventually something moved.
And when it did, people noticed.
When that happens, everything changes.
Startup chaos might create initial openings, but solving the right hard problem at the right time and in the right way is what actually enables mobility.
It's not just about being in the right room; it's about what you build while you're there.
And the bigger the problem, the more friction, confusion, waste, and inertia there are, the more the world will pay you to remove it.
That’s what makes startups the ultimate pathway for social mobility today.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life, and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it. You can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it…
Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."
— Steve Jobs
Many of Napoleon’s most famous marshals and generals—including Jean Lannes, André Masséna, Michel Ney, and Louis-Alexandre Berthier—did indeed emerge or rise to prominence during the Revolutionary Wars [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. The revolution’s upheaval allowed men of talent, regardless of noble birth, to advance based on merit and battlefield success, which was a major shift from the old regime’s system of aristocratic privilege [4][5].
Lannes: Rose from humble origins to become one of Napoleon’s most trusted marshals [1][5].
Masséna: Known as one of the greatest generals of the era, also rose from modest beginnings [2].
Ney: Advanced quickly through the ranks due to his abilities and bravery4.
Berthier: Survived suspicion of monarchism and became Napoleon’s indispensable chief of staff [4].