[...] "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 purpose. But when it came to the company they had become, his investment was less clear.

This is the story of thousands upon thousands of Valley founders who began with a consumer-facing dream and found themselves running B2B businesses. [...]

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 moment he remembered the cost. [...]

The Ruby developer couldn't name a problem with payroll that his company was solving; he thought they were just solving a problem called payroll. He was only on payroll for the first time in his life, and needless to say had never himself run into payroll problems. But he was working for a startup with YC credentials that had leveraged new technologies and raised a lot of money, so he could reasonably feel now that he hadn't just joined a company that did something incremental—fixed the various problems with payroll, of which there are many—but something revolutionary, i.e., fixing the problem of payroll.

"What parts of the city are you looking in?"

"Oh, you know, the actual city." I asked what that was. "SoMa, China Basin, Mission Bay. What people like us call the city."

He'd been in the city for something like three weeks, and most of what he knew about it came from people who themselves had only been around for eight to 10 weeks. [...]

[...] "Let me tell you what the worst thing would be. The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year. So far, they only lost one."

All the while, Martino's ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent "the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions," doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn't the discovery that you're unlikely to become a billionaire; it's the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.