SV Entrepreneur types, as a generalisation, are more like the farmers in this article selling there wares than the WS Bankers. Sure people are money obsessed but they do it either by being profitable or by selling equity in value creating businesses.
I think the Google slogan of "Don't be evil" is the best summation of the average tech entrepreneur these days, generally because they are smart respectable human beings. They are looking to solve a problem that exists, for people willing to pay.
Of course there are always bad apples.
There is nothing broken about demand and supply, only the steps in between are broken, which the financial institution's such as Goldman saps on.
I single out Hacker News as being psychologically different from normal software engineers. The focus on Hacker News is money, and many people here see profit as inherently virtuous. Social darwinism, eugenics, authoritarianism, and other extreme right political views are overrepresented on Hacker News, and given surprising amounts of leeway considering the swiftness with which other views are scrubbed away here.
Obviously these are healthy steps in the progression of some businesses, but at times it seems HN focuses on them to the exclusion of whether a startup actually contributes something worthwhile. It is probably arguable that those things represent a reasonable proxy for the value created (or expected to be created) by the business. Then again, there are plenty of funded (and acquired) business models which are based on cynical exploitation of the less-educated for the benefit of the business owner, at a net cost to society as a whole.
If an SV entrepreneur-type is more focused on getting funded or making an exit than creating net value to society, I think it is fair to draw ethical comparisons with the WS banker-type.
The whole GS franchise is built on their role as a go-between. Need hyphens? You might not understand the hyphen farmer's strange accent, but the merchant has been dealing with him for a long time.
What if Silicon Valley discovered today that they were putting millions of low-skill Americans irreparably out of work. Would this motivate them to modify their libertarian ideology, or lobby for free educations for the poor?
It's not a coincidence that you're disturbed by the comments. Wall Street entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are fundamentally very similar in mindset and outlook.
Entrepreneurs are trained to have a laser focus on their own issues and to look at everything in terms of dollar value.
Recently, it is becoming more clear to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that short-term windfalls are preferable, so they try to pump up the speculative value of their companies and dump them before anything bad happens. Pumping and dumping your own Silicon Valley start up is surely one of the easiest ways to get very rich right now.