This whole job obsession misses the most important point of startups: creating a new economy.
A lot of recent articles can be boiled down to this simple logic:
-Startups create more jobs
-We need more jobs
-Therefore, we need more startups
Like any other, the job creation ideology masks and simplifies reality. What we do is closer to creative destruction.
Lots of jobs should be destroyed. Call centers come to mind: many pay shit wages and offer no security. Lots of dreary clerical busy-work can be automated. Can you think of more?
New jobs aren't all created equal. Startups also create lots of jobs indirectly. I wouldn't mind being an engineer at Google, but I wouldn't trade that for being a crafter on Etsy. At least I assume they love what they do and have "flow"; certainly a luxury for most earning on working Amazon's Mechanical Turk for pennies per task.
300 years ago, some 98% of Europeans were farmers. Now it's <2%. The creative destruction of entrepreneurs recycled entire industries, giving rise to new jobs that have since been forgotten. Tinkers, coopers and blacksmiths have all but disappeared.
The web is only 20 years old and the information revolution is only getting started. If we do our job, the economy will be unrecognizable in 50 years. By then, our employment obsession - a bizarre relic of the industrial revolution - might be ready for the trash heap of history.