"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…
[...] He came out here to dig his trench in the industry. "Our generation doesn't have wars," he told me. "So they come here, and their battle experience is starting a company, trying to achieve scale, learning the hard way, bootstrapping."
[...] San Francisco was full of people walking around with their pockets stuffed with 1.2 percent of nothing.
