To outsiders, it used to seem as though running a startup was just a matter of hanging out with your friends while raising tons of venture capital funding. And that view isn't all wrong. But in the decades since the Silicon Valley craze began, critics have been working to give both insiders and onlookers a reality check.
"There's something delicious and hypnotic about being all in it together and counting on each other," Kate Losse, who wrote the tell-all "The Boy Kings" about her time as one of the first customer service representatives at Facebook, told Forbes. "It's maybe why people these days are fascinated with startups." Gideon Lewis-Kraus' "No Exit," from earlier this year, chronicled a startup in the midst of Silicon Valley's "modern gold rush" that ends up being more trouble than it was worth. As former Google programmer Michael Church once wrote in a blog post, "The best and worst companies tend to be startups. The worst ones don't usually live long enough to become big companies, so there's a survivorship bias that leads us to think of startups as innately superior. It's not the case."
