Business work is usually boring compared to self-directed work. The reason is simple: established companies want predictable returns on investment. There is little chance you and two friends will stop working on that internal reporting app and go into VOIP, to loud applause from your boss. That is not your job.
The same applies to grad school, btw -- you are a paid research assistant, not a freebird. But the problems can sometimes be cooler.
But it's a continuum and part of being happy is being humble and learning where you fit. I know many happy people at Yahoo who do cool new things. Others are chair-warmers. A large number are genuinely interested the thankless task of supporting hundreds of millions of users and petabytes of data, every damned day. Those people are the salt of the earth, and I salute them.
As for the second part: There is a sampling problem when you say things such as "all hype" or "people in the Valley do/are X".
If you poke your nose into 20 companies, Valley or no, you will find overwhelming crap. 90% of everything is crap. But you do not experience the world as an average. The trick is to find the 10% that are not crap, and the 1% within those who are really good, and see if you can hang with them.
In every field there are people who are so awful they don't know it. There are the elites. There is a large field of the mediocre who ape the elite without deep understanding. Then way out in left field are the crazies who scandalize, confuse --and somtimes inspire-- everybody. Find them all, learn to tell the difference, and find your niche.