>> And del.icio.us, and Flickr, and Reddit, and Digg, and GMail, and JotSpot, and Picasa, and Twitter, and Blogger, and HotOrNot, and LiveJournal, and Scribd, and AddictingGames, and so on.

Talk to me in 5 years when nobody even remembers, let alone uses these things. I know, I know ... you think "impossible - they're so widespread and useful!" Remember something called "GeoCities"?

And by citing these examples, I take it to mean you want something smaller that gets bought out by Big Corp International. Great. So you want to drop out of the system only to "innovate" for the system and put yourself at their mercy when they make an offer. But what if they don't?

>> One of the most annoying things about starting up is that everyone assumes you're doing it because you heard about YouTube or Google and want to be though guys. No. I have no desire to run a $100B company. If I end up building one, it'll be by pure accident, like if my market niche is bigger than I thought and nobody bothers to buy us out.

>> Instead, I'm a startup person because my math teacher founded ClearPoint and sold it for $40M or so. Or because a friend of my dad sold a company for around that amount. Or because the dad of a friend founded Avici and cashed out at the height of the dot-com boom, when it was worth $3B. Or because a friend of a friend started Avid and ended up with a few tens of millions. Or because a coworker was an early employee at Stratus and ended up with a $3M house.

So people who do it for the money are trite ... you on the other hand are evolved and do it from a "monkey see, monkey do" perspective. Ok I hope it works for you. But notice the timing of when your family and friends sold out. Talk to me after you pickup the Financial Times and read something along the lines of "China gets pissed after latest toy recall and dumps 1.3 trillion dollars worth of bearer bond and currency holdings, sending U.S. economy into tailspin from which it may never recover."

>> You probably haven't heard of any of these. That's the point. There's a lot of value-creation that goes on in the economy that isn't reported by the media, either because it's in an unsexy field like memory chips, or because the companies get sold before the media discovers them.

That's my point. How many of these were started in an atmosphere like YC though? Ask these people if it's really true that as long as you keep trying out of fear of shame, like the article suggests, then that's all it takes in the end.

>It does happen, though, and it happens to people who are fairly ordinary. All you need is a unique angle on some problem that nobody else has thought of.

No, you need a lot more than that as Aaron Greenspan and countless others can attest to.

>> (And actually, I'm doing a startup for a bunch of reasons other than "to get rich". When I chose my present job from a bunch of offers, it was because the founder said the company's mission was "to innovate", yet I eventually found that meant "I get to innovate, while you implement my innovations". Startups are really the only place where you can truly innovate, because it gets squashed at nearly all companies.)

So be it. Sounds like you have some career maturity to fall back on if you don't make it until you can recoup and try again. But think of the majority of the people that read this article. Mostly younger and with less experience I would say. And whereas failure is a badge of honor in SV and gets rid of your green-ness, you can explain to you're blue in the face how all entrepreneurs value early failure to others but they'll just dismiss you as a failure.

All I'm saying in the end is that SV is a unique situation. The Dot Com bubble, if you are a fan of history, was just a con-job to remove wealth via the market mechanism to set us up for war-mongering overseas. It happened before WW1, it happened before WWII, and it happened in order to mess up the economy and convince gullible corporations to ship jobs overseas because that's the way it's done in the "new economy." Which doesn't seem to work well. And now you have millions of young people with no options but to join the military. What a coincidence.
Don't expect "Dot Com Part II" or even the 'ol "technolgoy maturity curve" of consulting lore. We're living in very, very strange times economically and if you're basing your future on doing your own thing, make sure u know what you're getting into.
"Let's have meetings every week and have dinners every week and keep everyone updated."
Great - I just saw a midnight screening of Office space at this theater near me. Don't forget to have the right cover fax sheet for those TPS reports too.