[dmix]

People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average day-to-day life of working in tech.

There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider.

And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood.

But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets.

Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society.

It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.