Can't speak to startup space here much, but a few things about public sector work, of which there is a ton of tech stuff: 1. There's some element of "security clearance" for basically anything. It's still pretty minimal but worse than it used to be (e.g., last gig had them ask for my foreign-born father in law's birth cert). Lowest level stuff is often a "Public Trust" clearance that'd be required for almost anything involving access to a federal network. Feds still treat weed like it's 1950, which is a big hurdle for a lot of people, but does keep the competition down for roles. 2. There's a lot of cool public sector jobs and gigs, but the administrivia around even small gigs can be painful (e.g., a contract is contract), although on the other hand there's a lot of technical jobs (most?) that don't take more than an hour or so to interview for and don't involve any coding. If you build a reputation with the right people, you can get 6-figure, single person contracts which are easier to manage or setup a shop with friends. 3. Comp is very based on last level. If you want to live in Dupont / Logan Circle (do highly recommend) despite all the important stuff to be done in public sector agencies, you might struggle to afford to live unless you had a very high incoming income to report. Otherwise, recommend the financial regulators - SEC, CFTC, OCC, CFPB, to a lesser extent the Fed (Reserve). These guys always need tech help either directly or through contract. Every (non-"security") Fed salary you can lookup online, and I'd calculated the median at SEC was about $200k 5 years ago, which is proportional to their spending power generally.

Additional anecdata: Enjoyed an extended honeymoon through Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia in 2016 and my wife was bitten by a stray dog in rural Thailand early on -> 7 medical interactions involving post-exposure prophylaxis and rabies shots in all 3 countries over that next month. (She's fine BTW!). Price transparency was really amazing in all these places and I think it might be a single reform that's broadly ameliorative of the max-friction / painful experience of US healthcare. In each country, we basically called around, asked "do you have this shot and how much is it" and got a more or less straight answer, despite having some language issues everywhere but Singapore. Whole experience cost ~ $1k, including some visits for 2nd opinions to high-end private clinic in Singapore and we just gave up bothering with it on our US insurance b/c of deductibles and hassle.

Financial crime investigator here - also recommend "Sarawak Report" book by Clare Brown. She was originally researching deforestation and local corruption in Malaysian Borneo and kept running into Jho Low adjacent figures and eventually helped to source the key documents tying the whole scheme together. Had to order it from the UK and it's even longer than the Whale book, but full of crazy stories.