"Do you believe in the American Dream?" my brother asked.

I looked out the airplane window. Y-Combinator (YC) had paid for our tickets. Our application had been good enough to qualify us for a ten-minute interview in Silicon Valley. If we passed the interview we'd receive $120k in funding and entry into an exclusive club of visionary tech pioneers.

Like most Americans, we are descended from immigrants. Our ancestors arrived between 50 and 100 years ago. They built a better life for themselves in the New World than was possible in their lands of origin. That's not saying much. Some of them grew up on Asian sugar cane farms. Others were European Jews.

Success is earning more money at a higher status job than your parents. That was always an easy bar to clear. My father was a private in the US Army. I could have made him proud by becoming an officer in the US Army.

But the American Dream is about more than material wealth and legible status. My great-great grandfather designed tanks for Lenin. In Soviet Russia, there used to be something called a Coke party. You saved up money for days to buy a single can of contraband Coca-Cola. You got all of your friends together and poured each of them a single shot. It tasted like freedom.

"Yes. Yes I do," I answered.

Silicon Valley is a land of rainbows and unicorns where anything is possible. Stepping out of the airport, we were blasted with sunshine, palm trees and warm air. We took a train to YC's headquarters.

Everything I knew about Silicon Valley came secondhand. I had read Steve Jobs' book, Steve Wozniak's book and Elon Musk's book. I had read each of Paul Graham's essays countless times. I had read Zero to One and The Soul of a New Machine. I expected to see robots walking around or at least a Google Street View car but San Francisco appeared to be a perfectly ordinary American city except for the good weather.

YC seemed to be located in the boringest part. We walked past suburban house after suburban house until we got to YC's headquarters. We checked in at the front desk and waited for our startup's name to be called.

YC's headquarters is tiny for a company with such a great impact because YC encourages its startups to work in their own spaces. YC's headquarters is mostly just a big room. They fill it with chairs when they're doing presentations and tables when they're doing interviews. The big room was sparsely populate...

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