[...] Starting a company has become the way for ambitious young people to do something that seems simultaneously careerist and heroic.

All these kids, who didn't yet know what it was like to have a company of their own, or wind down a company of their own, or work for a giant company and ride the bus, seemed certain of one thing: that the longing for total revolution that had for so long been the hallmark of youth was, at last, about to be fulfilled. The only thing they could count on was that they were going to be the generation that partook of the process by which all would be rendered irrevocably different. It didn't seem to matter what the difference was, or whom it helped or hurt. It just mattered that things in the future would be unlike anything we'd seen be. And that, in the process, they were sure, many of them would get very rich.

[...] San Francisco was full of people walking around with their pockets stuffed with 1.2 percent of nothing.

[...] 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."

[...] 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 hang out at a cool, trendy bar." He was 23. The bar might have been cool and trendy in Miami in 2004.

[...] 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 attitude, as their second-through sixth-best-case scenarios involved being acquired by one of the five giant, powerful, wealthy companies. Even if Nick and Chris survived another year, there was a good chance they'd just be surviving to put themselves in a position to get a nice signing bonus when they finally conceded to days framed by long bus commutes—just like the many other entrepreneurs who came to look at having a failed startup as an altemative to graduate school.

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

[...] "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. [...]

"Maybe Microsoft cares if you have a degree, but the startups don't, and the companies that care about preserving startup culture don't. It's a meritocracy out here. Especially if you drop out of a really good school with a good reputation out here, like CMU. [...]"