>Startup consultants aren’t typically involved for the long-term (and are almost never offered equity)

That looks like a really hard and stressful way to make a living for an honest person. This means one neither has moderate contract values with large organizations nor the upside potential of equity with startups. How much would someone charge a poor startup? A mid six-figure contract could be the entire funding of a startup and would represent a risk of ruin.

One YC startup founder contacted me to thank me for mentioning on HN that we use their product and offered me a voucher to get a mug shipped for free. I haven't use it because I don't want to take $20 from a fledgeling startup's cash. Now he guilt-tripped me and I'll buy one as soon as I find time to get my personal card renewed, that Cialdini bandit.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but wouldn't making a living some other way and then working with startups one really believes in for equity be a better model?

>The most lucrative piece of the consulting market is focused on Fortune 500 companies. That’s where giants like PwC, Deloitte, E&Y, KPMG, McKinsey, and BCG all play, but for one-person consulting shops or small agencies, it’s pretty hard to land one of these customers.

It's true. We are a tiny tiny "boutique" that works and has relations with Fortune 500 companies and companies both from the Big Three (management consulting) and the Big Four (audit), but as stated in the article, it requires connections, introductions, but most importantly being reliable.

>I recently met with a startup that hired a very senior person from a big tech firm. He loved having a big title, but when the time came to build the product, he was unwilling to roll up his sleeves and write any code.

Related to this: one the worst experiences doing consulting for large companies was when we only were allowed to talk with C-suite execs to build a product for domain experts. We pleaded to get the domain experts at the table to get as close to the "truth" as possible. A horrible experience that taught us a lot. Now we insist right off the bat for execs to get us the people who'll use the product as a condition. We were paid to build something nobody used and, as engineers, these were the bitterest dollars we had to take at the time and we wanted no more of them.

>In the first few years, startup founders spend at least 80% of their time on low-level, hands-on drudgery: sales calls, product development, social media management, writing email campaigns, hiring key people, setting up payroll/books/insurance/etc…It’s not glamorous work, but it needs to get done.

No comment.

>Option 3: Go Up-Market

We've been fortunate to start in this position. However, given that we help these organizations mostly building products focused on machine learning, it has been a challenge. The challenges are of course everything that's related to the "ML technical debt". This was because everything was a "one-off". This rat race negatively impacted morale and stretched "time-to-value". We have then built our "MLOps" platform, https://iko.ai, after a company reconfiguration leveraging our painful and expensive experience curve to speed things up and save us a ton of money and headaches, but also reduce variance in work quality and lower the barrier to do good work as it takes care of a lot of things. In other words, if your activity is hindered with that kind of overhead and debt, it may prove useful to sit down and think to build systems and tools to make your work as consistent and systematic as possible.