"I was told to maximize my intellectual, professional and social value for a company." I did too, and those same parents are now telling us not to bother after

"I was told to maximize my intellectual, professional and social value for a company." I did too, and those same parents are now telling us not to bother after they went through layoffs and forced retirement. My dad worked ostensibly at one company his whole life, and it's more comfortable to watch him possibly fail at running his own business now than it is when I remembered him as a kid just working a day job I knew nothing about. "Why do we continue to preach the greatness, the undisputed manifesto of startups and entrepreneurship in general." I think you need a better BS filter. People in general are going to post their success before their failures, and that's naturally what gets on HN. But, there are posts about failure on here. Pay close attention to those. I've been in far worse entrepreneurship communities that were delusional on success and were less willing to reveal their rocks along the path. HN is one of the more down to earth ones I've found, as long as you can filter out some of the noise. "I want to know: Why the hype?" There's always a hype around startups after a recession. If the old business models are dying, what else is there to look forward to? If you're unemployed, already got tired of looking for jobs, what else are you going to do to make money? There's even more buzz around bootstrapping, and using minimal resources - my opinion lies in the data that there's signicantly less VC money thrown into tech (unless it's lab-intensive) compared to ten years ago.