If just greed was motivating Silicon Valley, workers would be perfectly happy to repeat the lucrative churn. But that's not enough any more. The average gung-ho, headstrong entrepreneur has got himself convinced that his little startup is always on the verge of being bought out for ten or twenty or thirty million. I call this mindset the Bubblegum Bubble Complex. That's where the entrepreneur lives, he's always thinking his little bubble is on the verge of this sudden expansion.
Startups raise money by trading equity.
To an investor, that little nibble of bubble gum is ten grand. Every dollar of cash raised in the beginning will cost the entrepreneur ten times that when he succeeds. But he admits the risk level would probably seem absurd to most people. Eventually, it becomes a lifestyle. When he looks hard enough, and when he looks long enough, he finds a place where his affinity for hyperbole and his passion for the nuts and bolts of engineering are not a contradiction - they are in line.