The most expensive lottery ticket in the world | Felix Salmon

Final paragraph of a No Exit (a 48-page, $1.99 Kindle book) review; tangentially, see ‘Things a Little Bird Told Me: Confessions of the Creative Mind’ by Biz Stone (The Washington Post); note that a subset version of No Exit is also (freely) available via Wired

"Founding a Silicon Valley startup, then, is a deeply irrational thing to do: it’s a decision to throw away a large chunk of your precious youth at a venture which is almost certain to fail. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley ecosystem as a whole will happily eat you up, consuming your desperate and massively underpaid labor, and converting it into a few obscenely large paychecks for a handful of extraordinarily lucky individuals. On its face, the winners, here, are the people with the big successful exits. But after reading No Exit, a different conclusion presents itself. The real winners are the happy and well-paid engineers, enjoying their lives and their youth while working for great companies like Google. In the world of startups, the only winning move is not to play."

The most expensive lottery ticket in the world | Felix Salmon