When I first started using the app, I was a fan but not a disciple. It provided an efficient solution to a niche problem — rich techies needed a ride home after a night on the town and couldn’t get one — and therefore was of limited scope. I was confused why a taxi app, or any iPhone app, for that matter, needed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. But it had a great data blog that I enjoyed, so I applied for an internship. When I got the job, friends who worked in tech were excited. Friends who worked in venture capital were excited. I started reading articles on TechCrunch about how Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, envisions a company that will become the universal way to transport purchases and people, and about how its motto had been changed from “Everyone’s Private Driver” to the more expansive “Where Lifestyle Meets Logistics.” The more I read, the more I heard, the more I started to see that vision myself.

What was impressive to me was not the ambitious leap of logic from “rideshare” to “Amazon for logistics,” but how quickly that final notion became a foregone conclusion in my mind. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of Uber’s media campaign that now, when I think about the company, I think, of course Uber will one day replace school buses, or deliver meals, or join with self-driving Google cars to eliminate private vehicles and save the environment! Conviction animates every start-up. Uber could be bigger than Facebook! Or, of course, it could go the way of the location check-in app Foursquare, which had a meteoric rise but whose valuations have since languished in the mere hundreds of millions of dollars. Not every start-up is an unequivocal success. Trying to pick the winners is part of what makes the current ecosystem so fickle, but also so fun.

The other night I was studying late for a midterm exam — I am a grad student in computer science at Columbia University — with several friends who will be working at Dropbox and Facebook this summer. Around 9 o’clock, we ordered Chinese food on Seamless. I paid one of the guys back with the digital wallet Venmo. This summer in San Francisco, I’m living with three roommates, also students doing tech internships in the valley, two at Google and one at the news aggregator Flipboard. For better or worse, these are the kinds of companies that seem to be winning the recruiting race, and if the traditional lament at Ivy League schools has been that the best talent goes to Wall Street, a newer one is taking shape: Why do these smart, quantitatively trained engineers, who could help cure cancer or fix healthcare.gov, want to work for a sexting app?

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the excitement I’ve been hinting at. Another part is prestige. Smart kids want to work for a sexting app because other smart kids want to work for the same sexting app. “Highly concentrated pools of top talent are one of the rarest things you can find,” Biswas told me, “and I think people are really attracted to those environments.” But that presumes that the talent at older companies is somehow subpar, less technically proficient, than it is at their younger counterparts. This seems unlikely if you look at Cisco’s list of patents. Yet clearly there exists some sort of discrepancy between the talent the new guard looks for and the old guard provides. There are thousands of engineers working at big corporations in Silicon Valley, many with years of experience and proven track records of creating code. Many of them have also been through several cycles of layoffs, as older companies divest assets and shave costs. So why are start-ups constantly bemoaning a shortage of talent?

The easiest explanations are mismatched skill sets or cultural friction. Older engineers are not smart in the way that start-ups want them to be — or, if they are, they have reservations about the start-up lifestyle. Both these reasons are symptomatic of how far apart the two sides have drifted. If there are whole swaths of engineering talent whose skills or styles cannot be integrated into a company, then maybe that operation has been limiting itself. As David Dalrymple, a technologist in the valley, told me, “The most innovative and effective companies are old-guard companies that have managed to reach out to the new guard, like Apple, or vice versa, like Google.”

Dalrymple’s description makes sense, but its implied recommendation — that new and old need to embrace each other — is difficult to put into practice. Several of Cisco’s previous attempts to reach out to the new guard, like the Flip video camera and the Cius tablet, were busts. The phrase that’s constantly repeated in the valley is “innovate or die.” Innovation, everyone seems to agree, is the answer. The problem is that so many “innovations” — Intel’s “creative collaboration” with the rapper will.i.am, for instance — are just some stuffy vice president’s approximation of cool. That is to say, they’re hardly innovative at all.

Dad, Engineering Lifer

My dad was 31 when he came to the Bay Area in 1995. He had a wife and two kids and went to work for a company called DSC Communications, which made telecommunications equipment. Much of the excitement in the valley at that time was over advances in Ethernet and network speeds that would eventually lead to widespread access to the Internet and to the merging of telephony and data. (Actually, we lived in a different valley then: “Telecom Valley,” which was a nickname for Petaluma, north of San Francisco.)