I'm talking about the pay-it-forward culture of the 1950-70s Valley when it was cheap to live there and people did everything they could to help each other out. This was the era when Hewlett-Packard refused to do a layoff: instead, it cut costs with a 10% pay cut and a day off work every other week. There was a time when software had an R&D culture, and Northern California was full of people trying to do something new and interesting.

Now, startups are a safety career for failed McKinseys and Goldmanites, whose VC friends put them into executive positions and let them boss nerds around, but it wasn't always that way. You didn't go in thinking you'd be a billionaire, but you could get what would now be an upper-middle-class lifestyle and work in the sort of R&D environment that doesn't exist anymore, because the slimeballs killed it.