Well I hope he's right, because I would love for it to be easier to hire good engineers, but there's a bit too much unsubstantiated hyperbole here. Specifically, why in the world would this be worse than the fallout from the first dot-com bubble with its explosion of ill-advised IPOs? Today there are a whole lot more people with more actual skills employed by startups with much smaller amounts of investment, and much more mature markets at play.
Is it going to sink the economy that a lot of 22-year-old kids came out to the valley and naively blew through 200k of angel money building an instagram clone? No more so than the tens of thousands wannabe actors waiting tables in LA.
Meh, I read the whole thing hoping to find something interesting, but came away empty.
Take this nugget: "Decent people who are being driven out of housing by rich founders from the last cycle who drive up home prices and rents in a city always short on affordable housing."
Yes, there are Twitter/FB/Google millionaires buying up property; but there are also a lot of foreign buyers. Walk the streets of Nob Hill, Marina, Cole Valley, etc. and you'll be surprised at the number of foreign languages you hear.
If you've attended a few tech/startup events in San Francisco, you'll know that a significant number of "founders" don't have any funding for their ventures and are hoping to raise capital because they don't have any money of their own. Even those who have raised money and can pay themselves a salary earn far, far less than the doctors and attorneys they could have gone to school with.
If the author truly believes that "founders", including the wantrapreneur variety, are being worshipped, I'd suggest she look at where and with whom she spends her time because it's likely more a product of that than anything else.
This blog post surely made me thinking. It's very well written but I hope it doesn't become a full reality (although some of it is already true). "Today if you are not a founder, you’re not worthwhile" -- That's pretty bold statement here and can't be applied to every field.
Is it going to sink the economy that a lot of 22-year-old kids came out to the valley and naively blew through 200k of angel money building an instagram clone? No more so than the tens of thousands wannabe actors waiting tables in LA.