[...] Pelosi praised Yelp as “a model of good business” and an exemplar of the “social and economic engines that drive the American dream”—a dream “built on faith in the future, faith in the entrepreneurial spirit, faith in innovation, faith in technology, and really faith in community, because community is what Yelp is all about.” Even better, unlike the local newspapers that Stoppelman and his fellow tech execs helped to drive out of business, Yelp didn’t subsidize a small army of journalists to pester politicians like Pelosi with questions about her coziness with campaign donors, or to write honest, competent restaurant reviews.

I wandered through an expansive unfurnished wing of the office. Who was paying for this? And why? What exactly was a NerdWallet? A woman at the party had tried to explain the company to me, but since she was a newish hire, she didn’t seem quite sure, either.

[...] One described its executive ranks as “treacherous, languishing souls who want to claw as much money as possible” from investors, employees, and clients. Said another, “It’s unclear what the product is.”

This company, an enigma even to its own staff, claimed to have thirty million users, although this was impossible to verify. More interesting, it had just secured “an outsized sum” from one of the Valley’s top VC firms, Institutional Venture Partners. As Reuters reported, NerdWallet raised $64 million in its first fundraising round—“far more cash than it needs”—with a valuation in the “mid-hundred millions.” This was an indication that some big-time players in Silicon Valley hoped NerdWallet would be the next “unicorn”—a company valued at $1 billion or more. By proving its ambition with such a large investment, NerdWallet would be able to attract even more money later, which would further validate its future-unicorn status and hoover up still more money as, if all went according to plan, the company became a household name. Thus were the unicorns of Silicon Valley literally wished into being. It was the most magical thing about them.

The tech boom, I had begun to see, was not a fount of opportunity, but an engine that transformed baby boomers’ pension funds into canapés and booze for millennials through the marketing budgets of venture-backed startups. Which was all well and good, but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something more unsettling going on. Were we young lambs being fattened only for the slaughter? Once we had grown dependent on artisanal breadcrumbs and tequila drippings from the table of our boomer masters, could there be any escape? Being educated through online pyramid schemes, and getting our news of the world filtered by Facebook, could we ever hope to apprehend the true nature of this mystifying apparatus that surrounded us from birth? Would we ride these unicorns over the rainbow to the land of plenty, or would we be gored to death by their sparkling horns?