The Leverage Inversion

A few months ago I built a domain-matching system at OpenFunnel. The problem was that CRM data is universally messy - the same company shows up three times under different names, subsidiaries get listed as separate entities, the domain field has typos and trailing slashes and www prefixes. The records all technically exist. They're just wrong in ways that make it impossible to trust the count of anything.

Nobody asked me to fix this. I noticed it while looking at something else. I spent a week building a system that does DNS resolution to canonicalize domains, scrapes homepages to compare identity, uses an LLM to reason about whether two records refer to the same entity, and searches the web when subsidiary relationships aren't obvious.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that it's this kind of work that's most of what I actually do. I don't get specs. I rarely get tickets that are pre-defined. The job is to find the things that matter and own them end-to-end. That's the actual asset I'm trying to build in this role. Not the codebase, not even the equity. The thing I'm building is a multiplier between what I notice and what gets shipped. That multiplier is what I mean when I say leverage.

What I mean by leverage

Leverage is the ratio between the outcome you affect and the inputs you control. You can be highly skilled and have low leverage. You can be moderately skilled and have high leverage. They're independent variables, and the second one matters more than people think.

The domain-matching thing is a good illustration. The technical work was not exotic. Plenty of engineers could have written that code. The leverage came from somewhere else - that I noticed it mattered, that nobody else was going to do it, that I could go from idea to production in a week, and that the result showed up as actual value for customers within days.

Most engineering career advice optimizes for the wrong half of that equation. Pay, title progression, the stack you work in, the prestige of the company on your LinkedIn. All of those are inputs, not outcomes. They tell you what the company values you at, not how much your actual work moves anything.

Working at startups has taught me that the input side is mostly downstream of the output side. If you're moving outcomes, the rest follows. If you're not moving outcomes, no amount of polishing your inputs will fix it.

The structural ceiling at large companies

A 100,000-person company cannot afford to let any one engineer affect 1% of outcomes - the blast radius would be catastrophic. So those companies put process layers between any individual and the work that actually ships. PRD chains, design reviews, A/B test gates, staged rollouts. This isn't dysfunction. It's a deliberate trade. The company gets predictable execution at scale. The engineer gets a high salary. The thing the engineer gives up is the ability to move outcomes on their own.

That's a real trade and a fine one for a lot of people. I just think most engineers make it without realizing they're making it.

How I think about leverage across the industry

The way I rank it: solo technical founders sit at the top - every line of code is a vote on whether the company exists in a year, and they own the equity to match. Founding engineers at seed stage (where I am) come next - you don't own the company but you own significant parts of how it works, and your calls on what to build and what to skip show up in revenue every week. Early engineers at Series A or B are a step down but still own entire systems end-to-end.

Then it inverts in a way most people don't expect. Staff and principal at growth-stage companies look like the top of the engineering ladder and are actually the trap. You're senior enough to be in every meeting and not senior enough to actually decide. Product owns the what. Execs own the why. Your job is to opine, influence, review, and unblock - to be the technical conscience of decisions other people are making. The title suggests you're shaping the company. The reality is you're commenting on it. Senior at a large tech company is the same trade in a less flattering wrapper - you're paid well to be replaceable by design, because the system is built so that no one engineer leaving can sink the ship. That's not a bug. It's the whole point of the structure.

The ranking is roughly inverse to comp at the top. The trade is explicit - you take the comp hit and you get the leverage. Most engineers refuse to make it and then are surprised that their work doesn't seem to matter.

The real choice

The career question isn't big company versus startup. That's a surface-level frame. The real question is leverage versus no leverage. Most engineers pick on the wrong axis. They optimize for comp, prestige, brand - all the things that show up on LinkedIn. I don't want to wake up at 32 with vested RSUs and the growing feeling that nothing I did actually mattered.

Picking leverage is not always the correct choice. The startup might fail. The comp will be lower for years. The work will be lonelier. But all of it is countered by the fact that whatever was shipped every week mattered.

That trade has been worth it for me. The reason most engineers don't take it isn't that they thought about it and chose otherwise. It's that they never thought about leverage at all.