The Job Posting That Doesn't Exist

There’s a certain kind of job posting that appears constantly on startup job boards. You’ve probably seen it. CTO or Technical Cofounder. Early-stage company. Equity compensation. Revolutionary idea. Looking for someone passionate about changing the world.

The requirements section reads like a hiring plan for an entire engineering department: full-stack development, mobile expertise, machine learning experience, data pipeline architecture, team building, and—almost as an afterthought—fundraising support.

The compensation section, if it exists at all, shows something like “$1 - $100,000 per year” or simply “equity.”

Here’s what you need to understand: this job doesn’t exist. Not really. What you’re looking at is something else entirely.

The Pattern

These postings follow a recognizable template:

A small company—usually 1-10 people, often just one person—is seeking a “technical cofounder” or “CTO.” The equity offered ranges from 5% to 15%. The cash compensation is either absent, laughably vague, or contingent on future events (“possible stipend if we win our current competition”).

The requirements list is impossibly broad. They need someone who can architect systems, write production code, build mobile apps, implement machine learning models, manage infrastructure, and eventually hire and lead a team. This isn’t a job description for a person. It’s a job description for an entire company.

And buried somewhere in the posting, you’ll often find a reference to “mentorship resources” or “founder education” or “accelerator access”—a tell that this posting flows through some larger ecosystem designed to capture aspiring founders.

What’s Actually Happening

These postings serve several purposes, and “hiring someone” is rarely the primary one.

Deal flow harvesting. Accelerators, venture studios, and founder education programs use job boards as lead generation. Every application is a free pitch deck. The applicants self-identify as people with technical skills who are interested in startup opportunities. That’s valuable data, whether or not any “job” ever gets filled.

Idea harvesting. Many of these applications require detailed responses. How would you approach building this? What technical decisions would you make? Describe your experience with similar problems. The responses constitute free consulting—technical roadmaps and architectural thinking provided by hopeful applicants.

Free labor recruitment. The most straightforward interpretation: someone has an idea and needs it built. They can’t afford to pay for development, so they’re offering equity instead. The “cofounder” framing obscures what’s really being proposed: you build everything, they contribute the idea, and you split the lottery tickets.

The Tells

Once you know what to look for, these postings reveal themselves quickly.

They can’t explain how this becomes money. Ask a simple question: “How does this company generate revenue in twelve months?” Watch the answer. If it’s vague, circular, or depends entirely on raising more money, you’re looking at a dream, not a business.

Why They Do It

The economics are compelling—for the poster.

It costs nothing to put up a job listing. Job boards provide access to qualified, self-selected candidates. The power dynamic favors the person with the “opportunity.” And some percentage of applicants will work for the dream.

This is the startup industrial complex at the individual level. Just as accelerators extract value from founders through programs and equity stakes, these job postings extract value from workers through time and labor. The same platform economics apply: create infrastructure, let others generate the value, capture a percentage of whatever works.

You’re not a job candidate in this system. You’re content.

The Meetings Tell

Here’s something that separates real opportunities from theater: what role do meetings play?

For dreamers, meetings are the work. They want to talk about the idea. Refine the vision. Have conversations that feel like progress. A good meeting, to them, is a productive day.

For builders, meetings are a prerequisite to work—sometimes necessary, often overhead, always pulling you away from actual execution. A good meeting generates action items. The meeting isn’t the output; it’s the input.

When evaluating these opportunities, pay attention to what the person seems to want. Do they want to discuss the idea endlessly? Or do they want to build something?

If their contribution is “vision” and “strategy” while your contribution is “everything else,” you’re not looking at a partnership. You’re looking at someone who wants the identity of a founder without doing any of the work.

The Builder’s Response

If you’re a builder—someone with actual skills who can create actual things—these postings should trigger a simple question: what do I need this person for?

You can build things. That’s your skill. If someone comes to you with an idea and expects you to build everything while they contribute… what, exactly? Meetings? Vision? Introductions to their network of other people who can’t build anything?

A builder doesn’t need someone else’s dream. A builder can create their own.

The pitch falls apart under scrutiny: “You want me to do everything. You’re not going to pay me. Your contribution is the idea. I can already build my own things. What do I need you for?”

The postings only attract people who can’t see through them—which tends to mean people without the skills to actually execute. So the dreamer ends up surrounded by other dreamers, having meetings about things none of them can build.

What To Do Instead

If you’re a technical person looking for startup opportunities:

Look for companies that pay money. Real businesses have revenue or funding. They pay market rates. Equity on top of competitive compensation is a legitimate incentive. Equity instead of compensation is a red flag.

Look for founders who’ve built something. Before any technical person joins, something should already exist. A prototype. A landing page with signups. Paying customers. Evidence that this person can execute on something, even if it’s crude.

Apply the follow-up test. Before committing to anything significant, give something small—your time, your advice, a document, an introduction—and watch what happens. Builders receive value and turn it into forward motion. Dreamers receive value and wait for more.

Trust pattern recognition. When something feels off, it usually is. The posting that asks for everything and offers lottery tickets is exactly what it appears to be.

The Multi-Level Extraction

Here’s something worth understanding about the broader ecosystem: it has layers.

At the top are legitimate venture capital firms with real capital and real track records. Below them are smaller funds, angel groups, and accelerators—some legitimate, some questionable. And below that is an entire tier of entities that look like investors but have no actual capital to deploy.

What are they doing?

Some are aggregating deal flow. Job posts are free. Applications are free. If you collect a thousand pitches and one is actually promising, you can refer it upstream for a finder’s fee. You’ve created value—for yourself—without investing anything.

Some are harvesting market research. Those detailed applications you submit? The competitive analysis, the market sizing, the technical approach? That’s valuable intelligence. Someone might use it to build the same thing themselves. Someone might sell it. Someone might just file it away for when a similar opportunity appears.

Some are building their own pipeline. A dev shop with capacity and no ideas can position itself as an “investor” or “accelerator.” Founders pitch their validated concepts for free. The promising ones get built—not for the founder, but by the entity that collected the pitch.

This is speculative, but the incentive structure makes it rational. There’s no accountability. There’s no downside to collecting pitches you never fund. The applications keep coming because the dream factory keeps producing dreamers.

The ecosystem isn’t just extracting from founders at one level. It’s a food chain. Each layer extracts from the layer below it, all the way down to the person with an idea and a willingness to pitch.

The Larger Pattern

These job postings are a symptom of something bigger. The startup ecosystem has developed an entire infrastructure for extracting value from people who want to participate in the dream.

Accelerators extract from founders. Founder universities extract from aspiring entrepreneurs. Deal flow aggregators extract from everyone. And these job postings extract from workers—people with real skills who might, under the right conditions, accept lottery tickets instead of money.

The pattern is always the same: promise access to the dream, extract value from the dreamers, profit whether they succeed or fail.

The job posting that doesn’t exist isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature. It’s how the system feeds itself.

The only defense is seeing it clearly. Once you do, you can choose differently.