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As an engineer, Chris could take solace in the cleverness and elegance of the nifty tool they were conniving, even if it wasn't quite the broad platform they'd quit their jobs to build. When he tried, he could burrow himself into the technology and forget about the rest. But when he stopped for a m…

[...] "Maybe we should just close up shop, take a six-month break, start over fresh. But the thing is that I do deeply believe in the idea."

It seemed he did deeply believe in a version of the idea: that initial company, the consumer-facing one, the one that served a broad and stately social p…

"Our many-billion-dollar business today," Chris said, unable to summon much enthusiasm, "is just a Trojan horse to many more billions of dollars." [...]

[...] My cousin was having the time of his life, but a lot of the startup guys—perhaps, in part, as a defense—saw riding the corporate bus as the most dismal of failures. Even Nick and Chris, who did not know contempt as a mode, were appalled at the thought. This was a somewhat self-delusional atti…

[...] One founder (his company was literally an app that optimized app stores for other apps), who'd ordered a water and had taken off neither his backpack nor his jacket, apologized on behalf of everybody for leaving so early.

"When you have an early-stage company," he said, "there's no time to…