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No Exit: Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush
For the founders of a San Francisco startup called Boomtrain, time is running out. They're burning through cash, sales have stalled, and investors are nowhere to be found. Welcome to the reality of the new tech boom. Sure, it has produced its glittering share of billion-dollar "exits." But for the vast majority of startups life is nasty, brutish, and short on glamour. NO EXIT explores the feverish world of company founders who are desperately trying to keep their dream afloat. It’s a harrowing and hilarious look at the Silicon Valley no one sees. This is an extended version of a story that appears in the May 2014 issue of WIRED magazine.
48 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 13, 2014
11 people are currently reading
174 people want to read
About the author
Gideon Lewis-Kraus
6 books19 followersGideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker, grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Stanford. He writes reportage and criticism and is the author of the digressive travel memoir A Sense of Direction as well as the Kindle Single No Exit. Previously, he was a writer-at-large at the New York Times Magazine, a contributing editor at Harper's magazine, and a contributing writer at WIRED magazine. Gideon co-edited, with Arnie Eisen, Philip Rieff's Sacred Order/Social Order III, and edited Richard Rorty's Philosophy as Cultural Politics. He teaches a reporting seminar in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. He has lived in San Francisco, Berlin (where he was a 2007–8 Fulbright Fellow), and Shanghai, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two small children.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
February 20, 2016
A short, entertaining read about the roller coaster ride of the first year of a Silicon Valley start-up.
I just didn't get that into it because I read the same thing (in less than 500 words) on ValleyWag every day. Well, that, and I already lived through the first dot-com bubble: for every Steve Jobs and Larry Page, there were thousands of computer geeks that bypassed college in favor of jobs at AOL, Kozmo, etc. I'm guessing they either went back to school or found jobs pumping gas somewhere....?
Now, as detailed in No Exit, history is repeating itself in Silicon Valley. The thing is, I just don't care about these people. I didn't in 1999, and I don't now.
The only real kernel of interest I found in this e-book was the attitude of a younger, too highly-paid, and very far removed generation of 20-somethings in Silicon Valley, who believe "the whole university system is going to be made obsolete because of technology [because people can learn anything online and through webinars]" and who can't seem to grasp the concept that "coffee shops [and] other...storefronts on streets [are] businesses with costs and revenue models."
I find myself sneering at young, privileged people who opt out of college in favor of work; these types will always know how to code better than you or I ever will, but you'll never have a conversation with them that goes beyond the intellectual level of an uneducated 19 year-old. Ugh.
I adore computer geeks, programmers, and entrepreneurs, but I detest the dimwitted -- nor do I trust any group that believes their method alone will render education "obsolete."
Silicon Valley? Definitely not my crowd.
And definitely not something I want to read about.
Come to think of it, the 50 page thing worked out quite well.
Meh.Whatever.
I just didn't get that into it because I read the same thing (in less than 500 words) on ValleyWag every day. Well, that, and I already lived through the first dot-com bubble: for every Steve Jobs and Larry Page, there were thousands of computer geeks that bypassed college in favor of jobs at AOL, Kozmo, etc. I'm guessing they either went back to school or found jobs pumping gas somewhere....?
Now, as detailed in No Exit, history is repeating itself in Silicon Valley. The thing is, I just don't care about these people. I didn't in 1999, and I don't now.
The only real kernel of interest I found in this e-book was the attitude of a younger, too highly-paid, and very far removed generation of 20-somethings in Silicon Valley, who believe "the whole university system is going to be made obsolete because of technology [because people can learn anything online and through webinars]" and who can't seem to grasp the concept that "coffee shops [and] other...storefronts on streets [are] businesses with costs and revenue models."
I find myself sneering at young, privileged people who opt out of college in favor of work; these types will always know how to code better than you or I ever will, but you'll never have a conversation with them that goes beyond the intellectual level of an uneducated 19 year-old. Ugh.
I adore computer geeks, programmers, and entrepreneurs, but I detest the dimwitted -- nor do I trust any group that believes their method alone will render education "obsolete."
Silicon Valley? Definitely not my crowd.
And definitely not something I want to read about.
Come to think of it, the 50 page thing worked out quite well.
Meh.Whatever.
February 21, 2020
Reality check
The world of entrepreneurs and startups has been cheapen by becoming a fad, business porn as a friend likes to say. True entrepreneurship is hard, not sexy. Hope this book kicks some butt and wake some wannabes up.
The world of entrepreneurs and startups has been cheapen by becoming a fad, business porn as a friend likes to say. True entrepreneurship is hard, not sexy. Hope this book kicks some butt and wake some wannabes up.
October 14, 2018
This isn't really a book so much as a long-form article of the sort you'd expect to find in The New Yorker, or perhaps the "True Stories" section of Reader's Digest.
The writer definitely has an agenda here in showing the "seamy underside" of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley "ecosystem," probably best summed up in his quote of another writer: "[startups are] a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions" that do "low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants." The story itself also seems to be one of a conflict between the American idea of chasing one's dreams being balanced with a good dose of sunk cost fallacy.
This is a good story that could be a great story, but this book is not the way to tell it. If it's meant to be an evisceration of the startup ecology or Silicon Valley, it's bringing a letter opener to do the job. If it's meant to be a biography of the founders, then it's more of a footnote.
No Exit really superficially follows and reports on the story of a startup and its struggle to survive, but the author doesn't add much depth or context at all. That's fine for a long form article meant for casual reading, but it's not what I look for in a book.
The writer definitely has an agenda here in showing the "seamy underside" of the San Francisco/Silicon Valley "ecosystem," probably best summed up in his quote of another writer: "[startups are] a large distributed workforce assembled by venture capitalists and their associate institutions" that do "low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants." The story itself also seems to be one of a conflict between the American idea of chasing one's dreams being balanced with a good dose of sunk cost fallacy.
This is a good story that could be a great story, but this book is not the way to tell it. If it's meant to be an evisceration of the startup ecology or Silicon Valley, it's bringing a letter opener to do the job. If it's meant to be a biography of the founders, then it's more of a footnote.
No Exit really superficially follows and reports on the story of a startup and its struggle to survive, but the author doesn't add much depth or context at all. That's fine for a long form article meant for casual reading, but it's not what I look for in a book.
July 29, 2016
If you want to be a high-tech entrepreneur, don’t read this. Or should you? Is this a strange time or am I growing old? The point is my recent readings were not optimistic views of high-tech entrepreneurship or of Silicon Valley. I just think of
- Horowitz’s The Hard Thing about hard Things,
- Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here (which is so negative, I have not written a post yet!)
- HBO’s Silicon Valley – nice & funny but slightly depressing.
In a way there’s always been creations which were not absolutely optimistic, but there was always some positive point. I think of
- Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest,
- Edwards’ I’M Feeling Lucky – Falling On My Feet in Silicon Valley,
- the very good Harboe Schmidt’s The Ultimate Cure or
- even very short and funny The Anorexic Startup by Mike Frankel.
Now I just read No Exit, Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. The passion, the excitement have disappeared. The entrepreneurs are honest enough to show they are exhausted. And the gold rush again will have more casualties than winners.
I initially thought it was a fiction, but the author is a journalist for Wired. That’s why my initial reaction was it’s not a good work, I could not see the style, the rythm. After I understood it was not fiction, I was less negative, thought it’s not the best document I’ve read. But here are some interesting quotes/lessons:
“The Valley has successfully elaborated the fantasy that entrepreneurship – and, more broadly, creativity – can be systemized; this is the basic promises of accelerators (Ycombinator et al.) that success in the startup game can be not only taught but rationalized, made predictable.” (31/847 – Kindle reference) and later “Silicon Valley’s most bought book, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, is a spirited pamphlet of winning exhortations to hunger, speed, agility, and unsentimentality. Almost every founder in Silicon Valley has read the first 30 pages of that book.” (618/847) If you do not know the book, it’s about spending little and pivot fast and I agree there is something wrong about all these fantasies. Indeed even Steve Blank agrees now. Check Blank’s statement about learning entrepreneurship.
Even worse, “[...] the Series A crunch. Due in part to the rise of startup accelerators like Y Combinator, as well as to the surplus capital washing around the Valley from recent IPOs, it has never been easier to raise a small amount of money, say $1 million. And it has never been easier to build a company—especially a web or mobile product—from that small amount of money, thanks in part to the proliferation of cheap, easy development tools and such cloud platforms as Amazon Web Services. But the amount of “real” VC funding (i.e., Series A rounds) to be allocated hasn’t kept pace. The institutions that write the big checks, those that might support and sustain real growth, can survey what a hundred companies have managed to do with a small check and put their real money on the propositions that promise the greatest yield with the least risk” (41/847) and “The problem in 1999 was that to get $5 million you didn’t need very much. You needed one or two Stanford résumés, an idea for a prototype, and a live body to give the money to.” It’s hard to get that $5 million now in part because it’s so easy to get $500,000, especially if you’re coming out of an accelerator. One way to look at it is that the $5 million that went to one company of 10 people in 1999 is now going to 10 companies of two people. You’ve lowered the bar 10X” (753).
And the consequences are slightly different… “The Valley is the place where the astounding success of the very few has been held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy and, well, their youth” (60). “You know the odds on any given company’s success are long, but that’s why you make a lot of bets. In the first dotcom boom, the risk was largely carried by the investors. Now that the financiers have gotten a grip on the market, and specialized engineering knowledge has become a commodity, the risk has been returned to the youth” (760). “The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year. So far, they only lost one” (778).
His comments are right, but isn’t this true of any bet you make in life, becoming an artist, a scientist. You can go for a safer life for sure. Lewis-Kraus is pessimistic, he sees the people who do not win. And this exists anywhere people try. I have more optimistic views. Even if I know it is a tough experience… I prefer what Latour said of his experience with Everpix: “I have more respect for someone who starts a restaurant and puts their life savings into it than what I’ve done. We’re still lucky. We’re in an environment that has a pretty good safety net, in Silicon Valley.”
A final quote I liked (related to age): “There’s been a lot written recently about the age divide in Silicon Valley, but even the more thoughtful pieces — such as those in The New York Times Magazine and The New Republic — tended to miss the obvious: Older people don’t typically work at startups because they have families and can no longer stomach the perpetual crisis. It’s exactly the same reason that people in their fifties tend not to be magazine freelancers or underground-club bassists. As one investor put it to me, When I see a 40-year-old in a Series A meeting, I want to pull him aside, put my hand on his shoulder, and tell him to just go get a job.” (706).
PS: it’s still a challenge for me to read an e-book all the more with these references which are not pages anymore. So I cheated, created a pdf and printed the stuff to take notes and later copy/paste the pdf…
- Horowitz’s The Hard Thing about hard Things,
- Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here (which is so negative, I have not written a post yet!)
- HBO’s Silicon Valley – nice & funny but slightly depressing.
In a way there’s always been creations which were not absolutely optimistic, but there was always some positive point. I think of
- Bronson’s The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest,
- Edwards’ I’M Feeling Lucky – Falling On My Feet in Silicon Valley,
- the very good Harboe Schmidt’s The Ultimate Cure or
- even very short and funny The Anorexic Startup by Mike Frankel.
Now I just read No Exit, Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush by Gideon Lewis-Kraus. The passion, the excitement have disappeared. The entrepreneurs are honest enough to show they are exhausted. And the gold rush again will have more casualties than winners.
I initially thought it was a fiction, but the author is a journalist for Wired. That’s why my initial reaction was it’s not a good work, I could not see the style, the rythm. After I understood it was not fiction, I was less negative, thought it’s not the best document I’ve read. But here are some interesting quotes/lessons:
“The Valley has successfully elaborated the fantasy that entrepreneurship – and, more broadly, creativity – can be systemized; this is the basic promises of accelerators (Ycombinator et al.) that success in the startup game can be not only taught but rationalized, made predictable.” (31/847 – Kindle reference) and later “Silicon Valley’s most bought book, Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, is a spirited pamphlet of winning exhortations to hunger, speed, agility, and unsentimentality. Almost every founder in Silicon Valley has read the first 30 pages of that book.” (618/847) If you do not know the book, it’s about spending little and pivot fast and I agree there is something wrong about all these fantasies. Indeed even Steve Blank agrees now. Check Blank’s statement about learning entrepreneurship.
Even worse, “[...] the Series A crunch. Due in part to the rise of startup accelerators like Y Combinator, as well as to the surplus capital washing around the Valley from recent IPOs, it has never been easier to raise a small amount of money, say $1 million. And it has never been easier to build a company—especially a web or mobile product—from that small amount of money, thanks in part to the proliferation of cheap, easy development tools and such cloud platforms as Amazon Web Services. But the amount of “real” VC funding (i.e., Series A rounds) to be allocated hasn’t kept pace. The institutions that write the big checks, those that might support and sustain real growth, can survey what a hundred companies have managed to do with a small check and put their real money on the propositions that promise the greatest yield with the least risk” (41/847) and “The problem in 1999 was that to get $5 million you didn’t need very much. You needed one or two Stanford résumés, an idea for a prototype, and a live body to give the money to.” It’s hard to get that $5 million now in part because it’s so easy to get $500,000, especially if you’re coming out of an accelerator. One way to look at it is that the $5 million that went to one company of 10 people in 1999 is now going to 10 companies of two people. You’ve lowered the bar 10X” (753).
And the consequences are slightly different… “The Valley is the place where the astounding success of the very few has been held out to the youth in exchange for their time, their energy and, well, their youth” (60). “You know the odds on any given company’s success are long, but that’s why you make a lot of bets. In the first dotcom boom, the risk was largely carried by the investors. Now that the financiers have gotten a grip on the market, and specialized engineering knowledge has become a commodity, the risk has been returned to the youth” (760). “The worst thing is that these guys get their funding tomorrow and are stuck doing this for another year. So far, they only lost one” (778).
His comments are right, but isn’t this true of any bet you make in life, becoming an artist, a scientist. You can go for a safer life for sure. Lewis-Kraus is pessimistic, he sees the people who do not win. And this exists anywhere people try. I have more optimistic views. Even if I know it is a tough experience… I prefer what Latour said of his experience with Everpix: “I have more respect for someone who starts a restaurant and puts their life savings into it than what I’ve done. We’re still lucky. We’re in an environment that has a pretty good safety net, in Silicon Valley.”
A final quote I liked (related to age): “There’s been a lot written recently about the age divide in Silicon Valley, but even the more thoughtful pieces — such as those in The New York Times Magazine and The New Republic — tended to miss the obvious: Older people don’t typically work at startups because they have families and can no longer stomach the perpetual crisis. It’s exactly the same reason that people in their fifties tend not to be magazine freelancers or underground-club bassists. As one investor put it to me, When I see a 40-year-old in a Series A meeting, I want to pull him aside, put my hand on his shoulder, and tell him to just go get a job.” (706).
PS: it’s still a challenge for me to read an e-book all the more with these references which are not pages anymore. So I cheated, created a pdf and printed the stuff to take notes and later copy/paste the pdf…
March 24, 2025
Finished in 2 hours. A small ethnographic story about startup culture in Silicon Valley in mid 2010s. Captures the ‘not always so sunny’ side of being a founder.
Can recommend to anyone who’s ever dreamed about being a founder
Can recommend to anyone who’s ever dreamed about being a founder
April 23, 2014
I have never been to San Fransisco, and know little about how business in the valley operates, but I have read many rosy reports in the news of billion exits and dreams becoming reality. This book though, shows a darker side of the hyped startup world. Following around the founders of a 10 month old company as they search for seed investment, the author captures the warped environment they are operating in. The long grinding hours they work for little to no money is a fairly obvious part of founders lives. The disturbing part of their quest for investment is the (faux) shill game they end up pitching at investors and employees. Stuck in a catch 22, where a team is needed to get investment, and investment is needed to pay the team, they end convincing both parties that everything is in place. Which is a lie. Fortunately the money does fall into place, although only at the last minute. These half truths clearly burden the founders with huge amounts of stress, but that doesn't stop them from dealing in them.
The author also spends time living in a house with another group of startup founders, who are also being crushed in the valley. He records the many moronic conversations that these guys have, mainly about some shitty app they're building that's going to make "doctors obsolete." Or how they introduce themselves with the date they bought Bitcoins to signify their status.
Despite the buoyant press coverage, the picture of life in the valley painted by this book doesn't sound that great.
The author also spends time living in a house with another group of startup founders, who are also being crushed in the valley. He records the many moronic conversations that these guys have, mainly about some shitty app they're building that's going to make "doctors obsolete." Or how they introduce themselves with the date they bought Bitcoins to signify their status.
Despite the buoyant press coverage, the picture of life in the valley painted by this book doesn't sound that great.
May 12, 2014
It's not just that the real world of a Silicon Valley startup is unglamorous or penny-pinching. It's that for most of these entrepreneurs it's SCARY. In a possibly facing a terminal illness kind of fear. Entrepreneurs have to live with the stress that they may effectively get FIRED from their jobs at any moment, and they have to live with that stress every moment of every day. The system is designed in such a way that almost everyone who gets initial funding will almost certainly fail to achieve their goals. In the meantime, the ever present stress weighs down the founders as well as their family members and loved ones. Vacations are perpetually cancelled. Payroll is always in question. And in the meantime, the founders constantly have to put on a brave face and sell the lie that the are ABSOLUTELY KILLING IT. This piece is a quick, fast, and insightful look at the depressing reality that faces Silicon Valley startups.
April 27, 2015
This was an interesting, quick read on the venture capital and entrepreneurship culture in San Francisco and the Valley. It followed two founders trying to obtain seed funding for their startup. As someone in the tech industry, I felt like the descriptions of the people and culture seemed a bit like caricatures, but there is truth to caricatures as well.
The writing was excellent, I've read other pieces my Lewis-Kraus and enjoyed them as well. And I enjoyed his perspective, if pessimistic, on the tech industry in this piece.
"The only thing they could count on was that they were going to be the generation that partook of the process by which all would be rendered irrevocably different. It didn’t seem to matter what the difference was, or whom it helped or hurt."
The writing was excellent, I've read other pieces my Lewis-Kraus and enjoyed them as well. And I enjoyed his perspective, if pessimistic, on the tech industry in this piece.
"The only thing they could count on was that they were going to be the generation that partook of the process by which all would be rendered irrevocably different. It didn’t seem to matter what the difference was, or whom it helped or hurt."
August 15, 2014
Dreadful. The story considers a subject that could be interesting with the right angle, but isn't inherently exciting. As such, the author needs to handle the material carefully to interest the reader. Instead, Gideon rambles on (at 50 pages, you'd be surprised at how badly this story drage) about branded fruit juices and other San Francisco products that the reader neither knows or give two cents about unless they too live in Silicon Valley.
If you're an insider in the industry, your own life and work would be more interesting that this story. And if you're not an insider, such as myself, you'll find this dreadfully boring and not expository in any particular way.
If you're an insider in the industry, your own life and work would be more interesting that this story. And if you're not an insider, such as myself, you'll find this dreadfully boring and not expository in any particular way.
August 21, 2014
This is a first hand look at how the startup world functions in Silicon Valley. I enjoyed the story and how it provided an overview of how hard the founders work. There's also a focus on how the venture investment plays a heavy role in the startup and maybe even is used to perform R&D on the cheap for an eventual buyout. If you enjoy the working of Silicon Valley than you probably will enjoy the story.
January 1, 2015
No Exit is a quick read about the bleak experience of two startup founders scrambling to secure customers and investors before the money runs out. One of the two stars in my rating is for the time taken to offer a counter-narrative to the quit college --> move to SF --> found consumer internet business --> become billionaire tale that drives a lot of human capital and money to pursue bad ideas. Otherwise, there's not much to learn from the story.
April 25, 2014
Loved it.
1) Fast, interesting. Read it straight through. More like a really good longform magazine article. I love the ebooks are letting something like this find a home, where before it would either be cut short for a magazine or drawn out into an overstuffed book.
2) It flatters all my anti-tech prejudices but in a way that sounds more realistic than any other tech reporting I've read.
1) Fast, interesting. Read it straight through. More like a really good longform magazine article. I love the ebooks are letting something like this find a home, where before it would either be cut short for a magazine or drawn out into an overstuffed book.
2) It flatters all my anti-tech prejudices but in a way that sounds more realistic than any other tech reporting I've read.
October 14, 2014
Great short glimpse on the early life of a startup
Having been in a startup myself, Boomtrain's experience resonated a lot to my own. The sacrifice, pain, hardships and joys in being part of a startup journey is in this short book. I'm aware that this is a Wired article also published online but bought this for a 4 hour plane ride and really enjoyed this.
Having been in a startup myself, Boomtrain's experience resonated a lot to my own. The sacrifice, pain, hardships and joys in being part of a startup journey is in this short book. I'm aware that this is a Wired article also published online but bought this for a 4 hour plane ride and really enjoyed this.
Read
December 25, 2014#kindle The backlash against startup cheerleading, it hath begun. This book speaks truth about how the Y Combinator etc. graduates are not masters of the universe, but gladiators who've been swindled into working harder for less.
May 23, 2014
Nice piece on the Silicon Valley entrepreneur scene. Knocked it off in about 45 minutes. Well-written, good characters in a short space. Certainly makes me glad not to be in a startup, and has an interesting perspective on what startup culture is about.
April 25, 2014
A quick, solid, contemporary accounting of the tiny though certainly hyped piece if the zeitgeist. Worth reading if only for a slightly nuanced look at tech in San Francisco in 2014.
October 23, 2014
Do you want to start a business?
Read that to see how things are not always nice. You can read it in one day.
Read that to see how things are not always nice. You can read it in one day.
March 30, 2015
the valley is bonkers.
June 26, 2014
Se te quitan las ganas de emprender,del todo. On the other hand, apasionante como historia.
September 3, 2014
Should have been (or stayed) a magazine article.
November 1, 2015
nice entertaining report on the process of 2 startup founders seeking for investments in SV
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews