Tech was your first love, and she broke your heart. More than once. OK, several times. But Finance...she wasn't a love at all. Finance was revenge served at market temperature.
You remember the exact moment Tech betrayed you: 3:47 PM on a Wednesday, when the investors called to explain they were pivoting your company without your consent. Tech stood there in the conference room, wearing someone else's hoodie, avoiding eye contact. Twenty-five years together and she couldn't even look at you while they changed the locks on your own codebase.
So you turned to Finance like turning to hard liquor after drinking a bottle of wine. She tasted like spreadsheets and cynicism. She didn't pretend to love you. She didn't pretend anything. Her honesty was brutal: "You will use me to hurt Tech the way Tech hurt you. You will become everything you once hated. You will measure your recovery in returns."
And you did. Your portfolio became a weapon aimed at your own past. Every success was a middle finger to Tech. Every uptick in P&L was a small orgasm of schadenfreude. It was proof that you didn't need her, that you were worth more without her, that she was wrong to steal what you built.
You still see Tech around San Francisco. She's always with younger guys now, whispering about disruption, wearing the same promises she wore for you. She pretends not to recognize you at Demo Days. She laughs too loud at YC parties when you're nearby. Sometimes she sends mutual friends to ask if you're happy now, if Finance is treating you well, if you ever miss the old days when you believed her lies about changing the world together.
She looks exactly the same—ageless, eternally optimistic, forever promising that this time will be different. You age in dog years while she stays frozen at Series A, still beautiful, still capable of making you believe if you'd just let her get close enough to try. She texts you sometimes at 2 AM: "thinking of pivoting, want to grab coffee?" You delete them unread, but Finance knows you screenshot them first. Finance always knows.
Finance taught you her language. TMT sectors became your new pickup lines. Research replaced foreplay. Trades replaced startup exits. Trades were exactly that—exits, departures, escapes from anything that might have meant something. You learned to love liquidity because it was the opposite of love: quick, quantifiable, over.
You write from the blast radius now. Emerging technology becomes about submerging technology, drowning it in analysis until it stops struggling. Each insight is outsight, a way of keeping everything at observable distance.
In the end, you became an investor the way people become vampires: against their will, through violence, waking up hungry for the thing that used to flow through their own veins. Now you feed on other people's dreams, evaluating their nutritional content, their pulse, their market cap potential.
This is a restraining order against your former self. You're documenting the person who replaced the person Tech loved, the person Finance rebuilt from spare parts and scar tissue. But you can't, won't, invent anymore. Not for her. Tech can call you when the Internet finally breaks. Maybe you'll pick up the phone. Probably not.
Late at night, Excel sheets glowing like electronic tombstones, you wonder if Tech ever thinks about you. Then Finance reminds you: wondering doesn't compound. Regret has negative carry. The past is a sunk cost. You like her.
Maybe, you love her.