My understanding as someone who worked in SV is that there’s a lot of buzz in the area around new technologies and people are always doing something interesting

My understanding as someone who worked in SV is that there’s a lot of buzz in the area around new technologies and people are always doing something interesting/revolutionary/whatever. There are investors who diversify their portfolio by investing in multiple high risk high reward investments like these startups. So even if you invest in 100 companies and 99 fail, the one that succeeds might be that unicorn that pays off. Concurrently, there is a greater understanding that waterfall engineering is not the best for software. Instead, software is more agile, in that you build test prototypes and have a tightly integrated feedback loop instead of huge project plans that take months to even reach market. The philosophy is more around testing market hypotheses quickly and iterating quickly. Another factor is there is a lot of hype around SV that forms a positive feedback loop. Of course investors are not so easy to part with their money but it is inclining towards gambling in some fields flush with capital. This is not true for all fields in SV though, for example in the biotech and medtech field, getting investment is much harder from my experience, as there are more regulatory factors, higher barrier to startup, longer time periods for outcomes, etc.