Are there more biotech startups than 30 years ago? Sure. But probably not more than 20 years ago, and certainly not more than a decade ago.

There's plenty of evidence of a shift toward entertainment. Look at the big startup successes of the last decade: Google, Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Digg, Bebo, etc. Save Google, nearly every major success story has been an entertainment/media play. In fact, I don't see this argument as particularly surprising or controversial, given that the web has been the dominant technology of the last two decades, and that the web has always been about media.

I think we both agree that personal ambition is pretty much constant over time. My argument is that if that's the case, then it's not reasonable to argue that people preferentially sought out "safe" jobs three decades ago. Smart, ambitious people have always sought out the opportunities that make them most successful; today those opportunities are clustered in industries that reward ephemera.

A quick side note. The number of biotech startups is mostly a function of the legal environment. The industry is more regulated that almost any other sector of the economy.

Your evidence is that most of the startups you've heard a lot about are mass market consumer startups? Would you expect to have heard as much about the ones working on infrastructure?

If I didn't know anything else about the industry, then probably not. But that's kind of the point -- that's the list of successes that everyone knows about; the list that every CS undergrad wants to found.