Probably because those are completely different skill sets from raising capital, finding product market fit, and launching a new product as a startup without megacorp capital and marketing behind you.

I left my company to build and launch. It is hard to find people who can actually work through the mess of an initial product and finding product market fit.

I think it's a partially mentality and a skillset mismatch between corporate and start ups

I'm not laid-off and currently in big tech, but I come from a scrappy start-up background. Let me tell you, I hate big tech and I know I'm just doing it for the money. Would be happy to build something as a side hustle.

Because even if you do have the talent, it’s a lot easier to get your feature/product out to millions when you have both the weight of Amazon behind you and existing customers.

Besides anyone can build a product. The hard part is obtaining customers. Too many people especially on HN seem to suffer from survivorship bias not realizing that nine out of 10 out right fail and many of the “successful” ones end up having a lot lower returns than someone can make as an entry level developer in a second tier city.

On the other hand, I’ve been on the interviewer side of the table enough times at smaller companies and software developers who have spent their careers in BigTech often don’t have the skillset we need and wouldn’t know what to do with an empty AWS account and new repository.

I did my stint at AWS ProServe from 2020-2023.