I feel for the author. There are plenty of us out here in the sticks (well, I'm just a stone's throw away from Chicago but others are in the sticks) slaving away, reading HN and TechCrunch and wondering, "does yet another me-too social network really need a trillion dollar funding round?" and "it's pretty obvious that Groupon is a bubble so how could anyone have let them get this far?".
In some ways we think the 1% are a bunch of undeserving assholes who are screwing things up for the rest of us. We see Valleywood as a huge bubble and, just like Hollywood, it often looks shallow, vain, and like nothing more than novelty from the outside.
In other ways we envy the 1% and sometimes even idolize them while dreaming of the day we get featured on TechCrunch or when PG personally invites us to become part of YC's next round.
We simultaneously love the big guys and hate them. Startups are more than hard. They're downright impossible! There are those of us who try despite this and I'd say those who go down that road are either delusional, crazy, or really god damn smart (like Einstein multiplied by Edison to the power of Newton smart). The market is already overcrowded by hordes of idiots who think "HTML for Dummies" books contain all the technical knowledge they need to build and run a web startup and more naive idiots who have a decent tech background (like me!), know they'll need far more to execute, but figure they're smart enough to learn what they need as they go.
In the end, really making it is like winning the lottery. You know you won't but you have to try to know for sure. The best we can do is just try to eek out a nice middle class living for ourselves and hope to god our business doesn't sink against the odds. I never came across an article that really hit the nail on the head like this one. Thank you for writing it Matt!