There is a sideshow of nightly drunken mixers and panels and meetups and conferences and such. If you attend these you will meet hundreds of loser "CEOs" with idiotic derivative ideas. Most engineers and founders avoid this, but Digg was one of main promoters of this nonsense, which probably colored ojbyrne's experience.
Accidental downvote, sorry. It may be more SF-centric than valley-centric. My experience at digg did prompt me to network somewhat, so indirectly, you're probably correct.
I agree with this. I'm particularly exposed to seeing how founders/CEO's differ within YC and at these mixer/networking events - the generic "location based recommendation something" ideas are talked about at the latter rather than the former.
