As someone who spends at least six hours per day with a Wi-Fi connected screen in front of him, who watches lustfully over his roommate’s shoulder as he fiddles with his slightly more recently released gadgetry, whose rhythm and routine are constantly redefined by services such as InstaCart and Venmo, I feel comfortable declaring that I am no luddite. But in the endless procession of new ideas and gadgetry, even the most technophilic among us have to draw some line in the sand when it’s just too much.

The Internet means that any hopeful producer can make an app or a website, any potential consumer can find that app or website and, consequently, anyone can start an online business. Under technical definitions of capability, everyone can now be an entrepreneur. But what’s followed is the fallacious assumption that everyone should be. The barrier to entry is at an all-time low, and it’s now up to enterprising young businesspeople to restrain themselves and ask: “Is this a good idea?”

This conflation of the possible with the necessary seems to go either unnoticed or outright ignored in the enthusiastic intensity of Silicon Valley. Fresh-faced college graduates and drop-outs hoping to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than passionately pursuing some crystallized idea, just try to get involved with any idea. Grabbing hold of the first vague concept to pass hazily through their mind, they construct a business on that shaky foundation and venture capitalists, hoping to buy in early on the next Zuckerberg, fund it into existence.

Perhaps the most entertaining startups are those seemingly founded by picking a number of buzzwords from a hat, lacking any tangible reality to their concept, consisting entirely of some ambiguous abstract construct of “modern.” Make a platform, marketplace, solution, network, framework, community. Call it connected, creative, smart, disruptive, progressive, social, dynamic, communicative. Any random permutation of these words composes a tagline. Take a phrase, add a nonsense pun, make a random misspelling and you have yourself a name. “veuMakr: A dynamically scaled platform for creative social media marketing.” “Persista: Intelligent, natural language technology connecting you to everything that matters.” Which is the intentionally unintelligible mad-libs construction and which is a real startup hiring across the Bay?

Some companies restrict the technical language to seem more accessible, but their purpose in existing remains somehow no less obfuscated. Their mission statement is reduced to being the X of Y or the A for B, Google of 20th century Amish woodworking or Uber for South Carolina Farmers, something already easy “made easy” or something already simple “made simple.” The employees’ best clarification, themselves not quite understanding, is to describe their non-business as “hard to explain” before declaring it a “disruptive” technology that will change the way you be and do.

Somewhat more understandable, though no more sensible, are those whose idea can be roughly reduced to “apply technology to X.” Add internet connectivity and social media integration to refrigerators, shoes, wristbands or blenders; ensure no minutiae of your life escapes technologically-driven narcissism. For the most absurd exercises in overengineering, look no farther than Kickstarter, where a bluetooth-enabled menstrual cup, the first truly wireless meat thermometer and all other manners of excess vie for your attention. These are solutions in search of problems, high-tech variations on the worst kind of infomercial snake-oil, purchased by those with high, disposable incomes and low attention spans, to be used once as a novelty and promptly forgotten. The companies they launch, having reached and exhausted all their potential customers at their debut, fade into irrelevance and eventual bankruptcy.

Then there are those who, pursuing name recognition and stable user-bases, have somehow forgotten to make money along the way. With no monetization strategy, with no subscription fees or payments or ads, with no war chests, with no developed supply chain, with razor-thin, even negative margins and with essentially no plan or business model at all, these companies ostensibly have no future. However large their user bases become, however much word-of mouth they can generate, with no revenue, they are ultimately unsustainable; their accrued fame amounts to nothing but a more visible collapse.

Companies like Jet.com, which loses money on every shipment, or Cyanogen, which distributes a free, slight modification of Android, nonetheless arrogantly declare themselves worth multiple billions of dollars — delusions of grandeur that are as entertaining as their inevitable failure will be sad.

And don’t doubt their collapse. For every Lyft, Tinder or Tumblr, and every other former startup you recognize, there are many, many more you don’t and never will. According to research conducted at Harvard Business School, 75 percent of venture capital backed startups fail. In the even more short-sighted technological euphoria of the late 90s, we saw this empty entrepreneurship rise and fall spectacularly. So before you launch your skills and energy and time to try and turn a profit on this latest collegiate bandwagon, temper your enthusiasm with some prudence and ask yourself: “Is this a good idea?”

Albert Hsiung writes the Monday column on STEM student culture. Contact him at [email protected].