Er. Well. Ok. So who's going to build Intel? Lockheed? IBM? Apple? Google? These all started as startups. There is real value to society to having people trying

Er. Well. Ok. So who's going to build Intel? Lockheed? IBM? Apple? Google? These all started as startups. There is real value to society to having people trying to do this. "Value to society while doing something risky" is actually not a bad heuristic for "glory". There's no clear alternative to "startups" for solving these problems. You simply can't be a happy-go-lucky bootstrapped search engine unless you're piggybacking on someone else (I love DDG, but there are probably 3-4 orders of magnitude more complexity in Google than there are in DDG). The situation is even worse if your goals are those of Tesla or SpaceX. No one is going to do that in a casual way. I'm all for recognizing the inherent incentive mis-alignment between the startup cheerleader economy (VC, TechCrunch, Wannabe entrepreneurs etc.) and the people on the front lines doing the work. But you can't just dismiss the startup concept outright as a con unless you're prepared to explain how you're going to give up or replace your CPUs, web search engines, and commercial aerospace. There is no evidence that small bootstrapped "non-glory" entities have much meaningful impact on this aspect of the world (with all due respect to all parties involved, consider the net impact of 37 signals vs Salesforce on modern business apps as used by actual large businesses).