We Lived on Tinned Tuna
Liturgies, Dashboards and Other Paranormal Phenomena of the Startup Economy
Startups are beautiful. Until the language arrives.
In the beginning, there are people: tired, hopeful, slightly underpaid, still human. Then come the rituals.
Alignment. Ownership. Visibility. Resilience. Dashboards. War rooms. Kickoffs. Values printed on walls. Founders talking about sacrifice from beautifully lit rooms. Managers translating panic into frameworks. Employees becoming "family" just before being removed from Slack at 7:14 in the morning.
We Lived on Tinned Tuna is a sharp, darkly comic anatomy of the startup economy: its myths, its sacred vocabulary, its performative suffering, and its strange ability to turn ordinary work into theatre.
Across twenty illustrated chapters, Ann Gelo dissects the founder myth, the legendary garage, the five a.m. optimisation cult, the A-player obsession, the digital quartermasters, the heartfelt layoff post, the advisory board, the company retreat, and the invisible people who actually keep everything alive while someone else records the podcast.
Part satire, part workplace autopsy, part glossary of corporate hallucinations, this book is for anyone who has ever sat through a meeting about meetings, received anonymous feedback from unspecified people, watched a dashboard become more important than reality, or heard the sentence:
"Let's do a quick sync to align on the vision."
A book about work, language, power, and the empty tins that remain when the story is over.
