Disruptions: Disruptions: Looking Beyond Silicon Valley's Bubble

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesA party to celebrate AirBnB’s new headquarters. A select group of people in the Valley are oblivious to the rest of the world, ensconced in their own protective bubble.

It is still up for debate whether there is a bubble in Silicon Valley.

One thing I know for sure: much of Silicon Valley is enveloped in a bubble.

I moved to the center of the tech industry from New York City last year, and I have never experienced anywhere quite like the Valley.

The money here is obscene. The newly minted rich are obsessed with outperforming their rivals. One industry party I attended had a jungle theme. This included a real, 600-pound tiger in a cage and a monkey that would pose for Instagram photos. A prominent Googler’s Christmas party in Palo Alto had mounds of snow in the yard to round out the festive spirit. It was 70 degrees outside. Sean Parker, a founder of Airtime, threw a lavish, $1 million party that included models he hired to roam the room and a performance by Snoop Dogg.

Eat dinner with start-up founders and venture capitalists, and the conversation can quickly shift from industry banter about the latest billion-dollar acquisition to the type of private jet people own.

This is where a select group in the Valley are oblivious to the rest of the world, ensconced in their own protective bubble. In the rest of America, where the unemployment rate is stuck above 8 percent, people are struggling to cover their mortgages or to find jobs that won’t be replaced by technology or sent overseas. In Silicon Valley, some people are worrying about which multimillion-dollar home they can buy — there are only so many available, after all — or whether their handcrafted jeans subtly signal that the wearer is more attuned to aesthetics, like, say, Steve Jobs was.

This is a company town, like Los Angeles and the movies, or Washington and politics. Everything revolves around the tech industry; there is often nowhere to hide.

Like other tech reporters I have spoken with, I often hear pitches for people’s start-ups in the most bizarre places: waiting in line at coffee shops or on the beach. “Hey! You’re Nick Bilton from The Times!” I once heard someone yell when I was standing at a bathroom urinal. “I’m an entrepreneur — can I show you my new iPhone application?”

Everyone here introduces themselves as an “entrepreneur.” It’s as if they hand out the title at the airport when you arrive. “Welcome to San Francisco, you are now an entrepreneur! Which start-up T-shirt would you like?”

This belief that everyone is an entrepreneur has a stultifying effect. It can drive founders to seek an easy acquisition instead of a quest for true innovation and a sustainable, profitable business — a truly entrepreneurial challenge.

There is also a bizarre micro-celebrity culture here. People who are famous within the Valley but wouldn’t be noticed anywhere else in the world, even if they were spray-painted fluorescent yellow, create copycat start-ups, with only slight modifications on a previous success — a diminutive variation of Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

But there is another side to the Valley. One where people are building truly innovative companies. Where founders aren’t driven by seeing their name on tech blogs or tweeting a picture of themselves with their new investors, M.C. Hammer or Ashton Kutcher.

There are truly excited inventors, designers and programmers here, some of the brightest people in the United States, who are trying to build something that will fix a problem in the world. This is why I love working in Silicon Valley.

Where else in the world would people try to make a better and more efficient taxi service, thermostat or tool for revolt? Where else would they reinvent education, the Boy Scouts and even government? And there are those who are helping the economy, creating services that enable people to find new forms of income.

Once you are able to navigate through the sludge of pandering and ostentation, you can see there is truly magical work taking place.

Luckily for people who live outside the bubble of Silicon Valley, there is a wonderful group of creators here who believe that everything is broken and that technology, creativity and guts can actually fix it.