A website taking on the kennel market-a pet-sitting and dog-walking app that disrupted neighborhood twelve-year-olds-raised ten million. A website that allowed people to rent out their unused driveways raised four million dollars from elite firms on Sand Hill Road. The word “disruption” proliferated, and everything was ripe for or vulnerable to it: sheet music, tuxedo rentals, home cooking, home buying, wedding planning, banking, shaving, credit lines, dry cleaning, the rhythm method.
Wherever money changed hands, enterprising technologists and MBAs were bound to follow. The optimism of capital, power, and opportunity. It was a year of new optimism: the optimism of no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas. The cloud was an unmarked data center in the middle of Texas or Cork or Bavaria, but nobody cared. Self-driving cars were considered inevitable. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality were coming into vogue, again. Two hundred million people signed on to a microblogging platform that helped them feel close to celebrities and other strangers they’d loathe in real life. A social network everyone said they hated but no one could stop logging in to went public at a valuation of one-hundred-odd billion dollars, its grinning founder ringing the opening bell over video chat, a death knell for affordable rent in San Francisco. Depending on whom you ask, it was either the apex, the inflection point, or the beginning of the end for Silicon Valley’s startup scene-what cynics called a bubble, optimists called the future, and my future coworkers, high on the fumes of world-historical potential, breathlessly called the ecosystem.
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