Start-up culture is corrupting our youth and killing real entrepreneurship

Plain old "Start-up Myths 101" article.

Yes I know that there are examples of some overrated, overhyped and overspent ideas but do people still believe that they get serious investments by coming up with random ideas? (except for IOT, see: https://twitter.com/internetofshit)

A little off-topic but, there exist some successful start-ups that did not go with the silicon valley way (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/mailchimp -and-the-un-silicon-valley-way-to-make-it-as-a-start-up.html)

> A whole generation is being trained to sell their companies as quickly as possible - rather than doing any actual work to nurture them

http://www.paulgraham.com/prcmc.html

Some people want to make new things, get creative, innovative, also build crap that seemed good in the first place. Such people are made for young companies.

Some people just want to make money to live a good life besides their job and be done with it. Such people are made for older companies.

Selling these young companies and letting them age in the process is a way for the first kind of people to get money out of it, to do it again and a way for the second kind of people to find a job in the first place.

One could say the same things about pro sports, actually. Many aspirants start very young (e.g. Tiger Woods) and put in 8+ hrs / day. Not to mention the sports camps, bespoke coaching, academic tutoring to maintain eligibility - all to develop a career that's "hard" over by 40, usually much sooner.

It took me a while to understand that most people who start a startup don't want to run it for a long time. I think this can lead to bad management.

Also, in reality, many startups stay small and go on to live like a tiny normal company.

There's a real difference between copying code (facebook/AOL/myspace) and copying intellect (Google).