> Sometimes the worship of the startup culture gets to be a bit much... there's nothing inherently more valuable about making your own startup than there is in working for someone else, and you also forgot to add "money" to the list of things that drive the YC crowd.
Before there were massive corporations employing everyone, people typically did work for themselves in some way shape or form.
Heck go to other countries, look at how many street vendors there are, people going door to door selling food, trinkets, hand made creations.
Why is our attitude that "some giant corporation should hire me to work 9-5"?
Why should that happen? Just because, by some economic anomaly, that is how it worked for 60 or 70 years?
Corporations are very inefficient, but less so now than in times past.
We all have heard stories of a secretary whose sole job was to take mailed in checks, open the envelope, take the check out, and type it into a computer, or copy it down onto some form.
Or even worse, employees whose job was to take items coming in on one computer screen and copy them to another computer screen.
Even more antiquated, the guy pulling the same lever in the factory every 5 seconds.
And we have all heard stories (or encountered first hand) corporate employees whose sole job was to go to meetings and discuss things and then write papers that got read by no one and ignored. (A lot of these types exist around the IT sectors in large companies, writing "strategy" papers on integrating some piece of software that consist of Power Point slides that have little to no meaning.)
Those are all examples of waste. Those jobs are gone, because they should be gone. They contributed nothing to society except to fill a void that existed solely because of inefficiencies in how large companies were run.
So now the people who would have filled those jobs need to find something that actually contributes to society.
That is sort of what money is supposed represent after all, how much value someone has provided through goods or service.