This is the crux of the piece
> All the while, Martino’s ultimate warning—that they might someday regret actually getting the money they wanted—would still hang over these two young men, inherent to a system designed to turn strivers into subcontractors. Instead of what you want to build—the consumer-facing, world-remaking thing—almost invariably you are pushed to build a small piece of technology that somebody with a lot of money wants built cheaply. As the engineer and writer Alex Payne put it, these startups represent “the field offices of a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions,” doing low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants. In such a system, the real disillusionment isn’t the discovery that you’re unlikely to become a billionaire; it’s the realization that your feeling of autonomy is a fantasy, and that the vast majority of you have been set up to fail by design.
The rest is the story of Nick and Chris intertwined with the writers impressions of the people he met at a $1250/mo for a mattress Hacker Pad he moved into.
The author is only slightly contemptuous of the young tech guys who made his beloved San Francisco shitty
> “When you have an early-stage company,” he said, “there’s no time to hang out at a cool, trendy bar.” He was 23. The bar might have been cool and trendy in Miami in 2004.