I don't know I knew one startup that had a full fridge of redbulls no energy drinks missing and they were killing me with interviews, I aced all of them but it was exhausting. So I see the fridge and a little sign that said "these snacks are the VC money we're burning through!" but later I see the red bulls and I just take one and tell them I had to, they were grilling me and it was a full fridge. So from the faces thinking back they saw that as an attitude problem because those energy drinks were decorative. That's why it was absolutely full, because otherwise there'd be some missing from people taking them before restocking.

I was supposed to look at them and think I could have them if and when I got a job after their day of interviews, not actually drink an energy drink to drink actual energy (literally glucose for blood sugar strictly for the brain function they were demanding a lot of).

Happened another time in Chile, there was a really nice foreign beer in the fridge, there was the rule printed on the fridge take whatever you want, but I ask anyway to be polite. The debtor founder does two menacing deflections, but I was incapable of fearing him, then is like "Drink it! Drink it! It's all yours, happy you have it!" making a huge deal of his graciousness but like doing the menacing tone and thoroughly resentful.

Decorative beer, make the fridge not look empty, and therefore the poor startup not look poor. It's just hard to see a workplace as a source of sustenance when the fridge is empty. And in fact that was to impoverish the employees without them catching on, drain them without getting drained back. Like the first place I mentioned, even on strictly caloric terms, thinking uses a lot of energy, chess players burn calories like swimmers, interviews are like chess matches. So literally the red bull was a literally a sugar packet. I said it meaning to exaggerate, I now realize I turned out saying the literal truth instead. I wasn't attuned to the fact I had to eye it and not consume it.

And depends on the startup. I would say YCombinator may want founders to eat ramen, they say this publicly, but actually eat it not starve refusing to eat decorative ramen. That I'm fine with. Frugal food is defensible, it's good, and further at the dinners they actually have dinner, rice and beans which is perfectly good frugal food and they make sure founders don't end up in the emergency room from malnutrition, far from it.

I didn't see many companies in Silicon Valley but at one of them, funded by Elon Musk who is allegedly a tyrant, evidently not, the calories weren't there just for decoration. They actually were there for the employees to turn them into labor. Pretty good, pistachios coffee pumpkin pie, I even brought bags of glucose to store in the kitchen to make glucose water, no other way of sustaining the amount of work I was doing. But it wasn't just bring your own sugar packets. There was table sugar I'd use sometimes, it's just not as good as glucose.

And there what was happening is at Halcyon, the company Musk was funding, they were developing a monopoly on a new technology, so the expectation was they'd have actual profits, and wouldn't have to squeeze every penny out of every person they could (like the other two) while maintaining an appearance of wealth so people expected the sustenance would go the other way and let their guards down.

Like I said, live in the Ferrari. Eye the sugar packets.