I'm tempted to issue a challenge to Silicon Valley: I start a cooperative kosher bakery with some friends and a bank loan, and you all start web 2.0 ninja-rockstar-mobile-social app companies with VC funding. We'll see who's actually making any money a few years down the road.
I really think the handful of incredible home-runs we've seen in tech obscure the fact that tech businesses are generally pretty hard to get off the ground. I have a feeling that most of the people that have the skill and drive to build a profitable tech company could do as well or better in a lot of other fields.
And here's the other fun bit: you can add scaling and a web store to a brick-and-mortar business, but you can't add a brick-and-mortar business to lines of code.
