(2025-12-29) Procopio The Unlikely Rise Of The Tech Industry Castoffs

Joe Procopio: The Unlikely Rise Of The Tech Industry Castoffs. Unsexy is the new sexy, and a misfit army of entrepreneurs are building unsexy tech for customers again.

About a month ago, “Bob” told me he was quitting his cushy CTO job without a plan for what he was going to do next.
Two weeks ago, Bob released a mobile app to bring automation, AI, and mobile functionality to an overlooked B2B2C sector.

The best thing about all this? This is not what Bob is going to do next. It’s just something he’s doing now.

tech industry castoffs and misfits like Bob have left behind the quagmire of quarterly OKRs and billion-dollar valuation stock option promises. Instead, they’re building specific tech for hungry markets full of underserved customer demand.
And they’re already reaping the rewards.

after almost 10 years at the company he helped put on the mid-tier tech map, they had forced his hand, and he was leaving at the end of the year. (made him lay off 30% of his staff, even though they were profitable)

Bob isn’t burning bridges on his way out, but he’s “not storing nuts for a long winter” either. He’s taking almost nothing with him. He says he’s got no use for a company that turned its back on its original mission, a company now too flush with cash that came with too many strings

“We’re not even using AI right,” he laughed. “I think that’s the one thing I want to fix most before I leave at the end of the year.”

The Friday he gave notice, he went home and started working on an idea that had been in the back of his mind for a year. By the end of the weekend, he was ready to launch an MVP.

How The New Tech Industry Is Building Their Tech

Bob is just the latest entrant into an army of former tech employees that I’ve seen start to coalesce and get to work on new technical missions.

Because the old mission isn’t viable for these folks anymore. Almost a decade of tech labor commoditization, AI copycatting, earlier private equity investment, and paint-by-numbers IPO-or-bust plans hasn’t just impacted the tech workforce

it has also started to become clear that this one-platform-fits-all approach to tech has left behind entire niche industries and sectors, cash-strapped startups and small businesses, and the hyper-growing ranks of serious side-hustlers, hobbyists, and creators. (indie)

How did this happen?

• Conflicting calls for immediate profitability and outsized market growth, two things the tech industry has always struggled to do at the same time.
• Market-share devouring platforms resulting in loads of unnecessary features offered under poorly-tiered pricing models.
• Rushed delivery due to an over-emphasis on Agile, Scrum, and two-week sprints, led by people who don’t know how technology works.
• Broken software and dead-end functionality, exacerbated by forgiveness of nascent AI being rolled out thoughtlessly.

Bob laughed. “That’s exactly what I’m doing. The opposite of all that.”

He continued. “Honestly, we’re letting each win guide us to the next win.

Once you reach that Eureka moment, some unconventional wisdom becomes clear:

• What if you throw away all the “voice of the customer” data logic? Customers are individual, unique, and fickle.
• What if you quit all the now-mangled Agile and Scrum development stuff? Going the wrong way really fast is not winning.
• What if you build for one user and one use case? Then two, then 10.

I’m no dreamer. I know that there are still barriers blocking every level of success in the new tech industry, and the same source of corruption that put the traditional tech industry into its box of backlash is waiting there to corrupt Bob and every castoff

How do you think this mess all got started in the first place?
The answer is always money.

there will be winners, the ones who can produce great, useful tech and do it most efficiently, quickly, and with the most optimum results for the right market of customers. And there will be losers. There are always losers.

people like Bob aren’t worried about the tech industry. They’re just worried about solving their customer’s next big problem. (customer-driven)

Bob is betting against a fallacy in the traditional go-to-market math. It’s actually a fallacy I’ve been hammering into entrepreneur skulls for years.

You don’t need to aim for a 0.1 percent share of a multi-billion dollar market. You need to aim for a 51 percent share of a much smaller, much more well-defined market. (category design)

Now here’s the bad news. This new misfit tech industry is going to have to figure out how to get these new businesses sustainable.