Tech startups Silicon Valley

FORTUNE — In places like Boston and New York, they could be called “wantrepreneurs, ” but here in Silicon Valley, they’re just “wannabes.”

They’re the poseurs who think all it takes to be a startup founder is sauntering up to the bar at San Francisco’s 21st Amendment or cracking open their laptop at Palo Alto’s Coupa Café and calling themselves one. And dear god, they’re everywhere — so ubiquitous it’s like a localized, vocational epidemic of World War Z-esque proportions.

I’m not talking about the hardworking folks who live and breathe their ideas, sleeping on shared office sofas, paying themselves just enough to scrape by. I mean the rest. Ask them what they do, and they’ll say they’re working on a startup. Ask them what the startup is, and the answer can be comical. One first-timer said he was still working on the idea, that he’d think about it, and that he’d get back to me. Well, thanks, buddy, but people don’t say they’re mothers or fathers before they even have kids.

Others have ideas, but they’re rip-offs of already-successful companies or just nonsensical. When another passenger on the morning light rail pitched me the “Airbnb for medical scrubs, ” I just about spit out my coffee. Others still prefer the Silicon Valley nightlife too much and “innovate” far too little for anything quality to get made. They’re like the worst kind of D-lister — they just don’t know it yet.

“Wannabe entrepreneurs with laptops hog up the physical and digital bandwidth of the Valley right now, ” griped one entrepreneur, whose company was acquired by Google for millions. “It’s almost an excuse to be lazy and put yourself in charge of something, ” agrees another co-founder. His own three-year-old venture counts Google Ventures as a backer.

Tech is so hip now, movies like “The Internship, ” a fictional look at the Google intern experience, get made.