Take this as a life-saving advice and swallow the “red-pill”. Software is a dead-end career unless you are extroverted. It’s a technical area as opposed to functional. Learn a lot, earn a lot - within first 3–5 years - in order to improve your financial situation and invest aggressively (stocks and cryptos). If you have introverted tendencies, you have three options - gain charters in functional areas (finance / supply-chain) or move into techno-functional areas in enterprise systems (SAP / SAS / Oracle Financials / FactSet etc.) or find an “exit strategy”. In fact, I would aggressively suggest get a “secondary” career planned for contingency. As far as startups are concerned, don’t. Do your own non-tech side-business with a focus on cash-flow staying away from stressful, over-valued (hard to value a private company with a bleeding-bottom-line funded by easy-VC-money during a period of chronically-low interest-rate) , over-hyped and saturated commodity tech startups. Startups are overrated in software unless you have strong network/leadership/deal-making capabilities. Moreover startups were originally designed to work on tough-problems like decentralised governance (crypto) or novel drug delivery system (biotech), for example. Just don’t end up being a glorified engineer masqueraded as CTO in a “commodity” tech startup where founders are privileged with MBA without much operational-experience/engineering. Life is too short to stuck in those kind of startups. BTW, stop being influenced by media-induced brainwash about Zuckerberg or Gates. You have no idea (unless you read history objectively) how privileged they were and how much important role it played in their success. Coding talent were not so much.