I understand it perfectly. The foundation of that hate is seeing an incredible amount of money, time, and energy devoted to a particularly brutal and inefficie

I understand it perfectly. The foundation of that hate is seeing an incredible amount of money, time, and energy devoted to a particularly brutal and inefficient way of finding the next startup that becomes Facebook, and getting in early. There's a saying: "Lotteries are a tax on stupid people". I would extend that to the 'circle jerk' in the Valley. You have people with money throwing it at people with ideas, hoping to win the lottery, basically. Along the way, you get a thousand crappy startups burning out ten thousand 19 year olds who dropped out of school because Zuckerberg did. It's wasteful. It generates companies like Flooze. It's a massive hype machine sucking up all the oxygen in the room, depriving other, more sensible, but less glamourous businesses of resources. The first comment on the article really captures it: "And you know what also sucks about this whole craziness that went on during these hard years?" "That minority of mid-career people like me, with both real-word business experience and multiple engineering degrees and realworld P&L and people management experience, who started companies this past 3 years with good solid ideas that can make money but couldn't raise much money due to a combination of age discrimination and the fact that the money was going to young, inexperienced entrepreneurs with stupid but frothy sexy ideas like Gourmair." Indeed. Lyons also identifies another real cost to the startup mania: "Meanwhile our country is facing a crisis because we have a shortage of students in STEM -- science, technology, engineering and math. Every big company in Silicon Valley is starved for talent. And there is an entire generation of young people who, instead of studying those hard subjects, would rather slap together the fourteenth version of a peeer-to-peer car sharing service or alternative taxi service. Because it's easy and you might get rich quick."