The people who come here looking for riches and playing at entrepreneurship are not "working for a paycheck". They are people who crave social standing, who crave money. They don't want to be comfortably middle class; they want to be elite. There was a giant wave of them during Bubble 1.0, but come 2001 most of them went back to wherever they were before. In the last few years they are thick on the ground again. They are very different than the people who came to make a difference, who came to create for the joy of it.
I don't see the current crop of them as any worse than the 1990s invasion. But they're sure not any better.
I also think this guy definitely does recognize how lucky he was. He opens talking about "more than I ever could have dreamed" and ends with feeling like he was lucky enough to witness "the very birth of rock and roll".