The Danger of Celebritizing Entrepreneurship

I heard more or less the same at a meetup last month, from a headhunter guy who wanted to convince a few of us there to go work for some company at below average market wages.

This argument comes along a lot among people who's actual complaint is that engineers are too expensive these days, despite the number of other less complex professions that are more well remunerated and have no shortage of manpower right now.

One thing that is driving entrepreneur celebrity culture is the confusion of raising funding and building a revenue positive business. Fund raising is a newsworthy event that 's easy to write about and already has an array of narrative hooks that can be applied to it. It's easily digested by tech news ecosystem that has in many cases explicitly rejected any pretension of journalistic objectivity in favour of boosterism and participation in the money cycle that they are hypothetically supposed to be explaining to their readers.

As an event fundraising has a certain level of glamour in that it brings together important and powerful people; or people who would like to think they are important and powerful which is much the same thing as far as the protagonists are concerned. It's easy to fall into the scenesterism and the recurring characters (the foul-mouthed VC, the bright eyed fresh faced first time founders, the once successful entrepreneurs trying desperately to recapture the magic) and forget that underlying it all are supposed to be actual, unglamorous businesses that are solving problems for paying customers.

To some extent Silicon Valley is ripe for disruption, but that's mostly because it seems tired compared to what it once was. The positive qualities of Silicon Valley culture, the can-do optimism, the inventiveness, the piratical willingness to upset the apple-carts of the established order have been supplanted by an orderly narrative of programmed success that can pull people into creating "disruptive" companies that are just better ways to pull eyeballs to ads. For a social group that talks about innovation, it's amazing how narrow the definition of innovation can seem.

Real innovation has moved on from the valley, it's happening in marginal places where the creativity has to do with making better use of limited resources, it's going to be messing up orderly narratives of social media success and creating new products that rebuild the value chain in all industries.

No, the point was his assertion as far as I could tell is that people like me are making vapid products because we aren't giving up our dreams and working at the "next hot startup."