Very curious to see what people think about O&#x27;Reilly&#x27;s supposition that many, if not most, startups are just another financial instrument that don&#x27;t actually create wealth:<p>&quot;When a startup doesn’t have an underlying business model that will eventually produce real revenues and profits, and the only way for its founders to get rich is to sell to another company or to investors, you have to ask yourself whether that startup is really just a financial instrument, not that dissimilar to the CDOs of the 2008 financial crisis — a way of extracting value from the economy without actually creating it.&quot;