At a BBQ last week with a group of Y Combinator graduates, the conversation went predictably back and fourth, sounding something like this: What batch were you in? How many times did you pivot? How much did you raise? From who? How many users have you got now? What’s your growth rate? Who’s going to acquire you? It’s never about the technology or impact it’s having, it’s about the game of entrepreneurship; getting users, funding and exiting as quickly as you can.
Normal people call this "talking shop". Get a bunch of doctors together sometime and see if they're talking about changing the world.
I believe her point was that she expected to hear tech entrepreneurs "talking shop" about tech, rather than about "entrepreneurship".
To follow your analogy, it's as if you heard a bunch of doctors discussing how many patients they had last week, instead of interesting cases among those patients.
I don't live anywhere near the Valley nor am I an entrepreneur, so I can't either agree or disagree with her points, but I confess that I would've had similar expectations in her place.
You might hear them complaining about medicare reimbursement, because that's (sadly) part of the daily life of a doctor. You don't often hear them talking about Kaiser's quarterly revenue numbers, or who gave whom a loan to go to medical school, or how Stanford is totally dominating the regional market for organ transplants (or whatever).
I know a lot of doctors, and a lot of entrepreneurs, and I'll take the medical shop-talk any day of the week, because doctors are primarily interested in medicine, not business. It's unique and refreshing when you meet an entrepreneur who is primarily interested in something other than money.
These 'tech people' are trying to run and grow businesses. Everything mentioned in the GP is relevant to that so I'm surprised that she (and you) would think differently.
At a BBQ last week with a group of Y Combinator graduates, the conversation went predictably back and fourth, sounding something like this: What batch were you in? How many times did you pivot? How much did you raise? From who? How many users have you got now? What’s your growth rate? Who’s going to acquire you? It’s never about the technology or impact it’s having, it’s about the game of entrepreneurship; getting users, funding and exiting as quickly as you can.
Normal people call this "talking shop". Get a bunch of doctors together sometime and see if they're talking about changing the world.