Pitch decks and promotional collateral talk about world domination and changing the way we work, play, and live. [...] "This is not a small social app," the founder of Clinkle, a small payment app, said. "What we're trying to do here is fundamentally change how people trade. Every human being, every day, has to do this." The existing markets are always broken, the pitch decks say, and the time is always now.

For the startups that fail, however, most of these words fall on empty rooms. The founder of Powa Technologies once proclaimed, "What we're building here is the biggest tech company in living memory." They shuttered a year later.