Silicon Valley 2.0

Not too long ago, in a city known for its sunshine and surrounding mountains, a team of young developers submitted their newest creation to Apple’s app store.

It was called Typic. Beautiful in its simplicity, it offered a means of artistically embedding text in a photo, along with various filters and other options. After the app store launch, the team members returned to their day jobs in digital marketing—keeping an eye on the downloads, just in case. Having built other apps, they weren’t sure if the new one would take off.

Within days, Typic registered several hundred...

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