Max Klein

They stood there in a circle, talking to each other. I moved slowly closer, gripping on the beer bottle and feeling highly embarassed. Why ever had I come to this party! Here I was, all alone, being ignored by everyone apart from some guy who had shortly asked my name and then quickly wandered off.

I moved in closer to the group. They were talking about some algorithms for scaling huge databases. The discussion mostly seemed to be between two guys, who seemed to simply be flooding each other with more and more information, while the rest of the ground made statements like “I believe twitter had a similar problem.”

I positioned myself beside an indian looking guy, since he seemed to also not be contributing much to the party. I figured I could talk to him. Sure enough, we drifted into conversation. I spoke a bit about my company, and then he told me that he was just 19, and he was working at a startup.

I asked him why he’s not at college. He said that this is the right time to work at a startup, when there were so many jobs. He explained that he had actually come to silicon valley to start his own company, but that he met some ‘awesome’ people, and decided to join their startup.

After some small talk, he drifted off, leaving me alone. I went out to the balcony and stood there, looking out at the moon. All I could think off what how dumb that guy was. No, I would not tell him to his face, because I had learnt the hard way that in America you don’t tell people that you think their idea is stupid. No, you encourage, them always. The last time I told someone their idea was stupid, I got kicked out of a bar by a big black guy.

This 19 year old kid had come here to seek his fortune, I guess. But he was not here starting a company, rather, he was here working for others. I thought to myself: he has his entire life to work for others. He would have much more fun in college and learn a wide range of things, but instead he was here. He somehow believe that working at that startup would give him a better chance at having a successful business in a few years. Which is completely wrong, he would meet potential co-founders just as well in college, and he would learn a lot more.

But you don’t say such things in America. In two or three years, when he has tried some startup with some people he met out of a the tiny pool of people who worked at his company, and it fails, he’ll go back to college, disillusioned. At some point in his life, he’ll realise that he could have made a company at any point in his life. There was no rush to go into it. He could meet the people whenever he wanted, he could always have gone to the valley.

But he rushed into something based off hype he read from the internet. He somehow got sucked into the system, and now he can’t see past it. It’s sad, but we saw the same thing happen in ’99. People gave up their youth to chase some form of fools gold, instead of maturing and learning, they went trying to turn copper into gold, constantly being fed stories on the internet about the last guy who just succeeded at that.