Dreams of internet success impose a heavy burden on the recent immigrants. The newcomers soon find themselves buzzing like flies in the sticky paper of the startup life. The ethos that surrounds them says that founding a successful company - getting round after round of venture-capital funding, their startup then valued in the billions - is the measure of the highest personal achievement. It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fith or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by teh wayside - as the startup culture sees it - while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

The hopefuls pride themselves on the role they believe they will play as members of a vanguard that will disrupt the existing social, economic, and political structures. But the would-be CEOs can more accurately be called conformists. They want what they are supposed to want; they are the men in the grey flannel suits of our time: tee shirts and jeans, casual business khakis. They are not wild. They march down the startup alley of Second Street not as assemblies of punks but like a disciplined army on maneuvers - yet ever anxious. Their ventures are likely to fade away, as a fickle public disposes of both the soldiers and the code, app by app.