The drive to acquire talent in Silicon Valley has been an ongoing war for decades. Established tech companies fight with each other. Startups make outrageous offers of future benefits to fight the rising salaries that bigger companies are offering. Now, the players are getting younger and younger. Are they too young to be playing with adults?

We walked past empty beer bottles and chalkboards scrawled with7.5m > 250k, the words energy, control, status, and eco, and drawings of squids. Fontenot — who wears his hair in a faux-hawk and said he’s famous for his pajama bottoms but had put on trackpants for my benefit — led me up a metal ladder to the gravel-and-tar roof where we met Matin, who had dropped out of school and moved to the Bay Area on his own when he was 17, to watch the sunset, as is their ritual.