A few days ago I attended the Lunch 2.0 event hosted at Oodle’s office in San Mateo. It was a departure from other Lunch 2.0 events I’ve attended for two important reasons: First, the food was really good Mediterranean cuisine, and second, there were no name tags.

Without name tags, the possible obvious conversation starters of “That’s a neat name for a company, what does it do,” “Oh you work for Google, that’s awesome,” “Oh you work for Microsoft, I’m sorry,” and “Interesting name, are you Jewish?” are all removed. What’s left is “Wow, that’s a lot of food on your plate.”

With that, I loaded up on pita and crackers covered in strange things that tasted pretty good and gave it my best shot.

My first conversation was with a woman who was new to the area and to the industry who asked the rather newbie-ish question of, “So, what is your company really doing to add value to the customer? How are you changing the world?”

What followed the question was a whole lot of explaining about how everybody in Silicon Valley is building widgets and copying each other and creating generally useless products.

“Well,” I said confidently, “we’re making an entertainment product.”

With that, I made it abundantly clear: We are not fooling ourselves.

It’s kind of a shame, because now that I think about it, the best coders, designers, and businesspeople I know are pursuing products that are purely about business. They’re products that are interesting that will generate revenue and build a company and that’s the end of it. Heck, that’s what I’m doing!

Meanwhile, I have talked to folks with real ambitions of changing the world, of doing something for the greater good, who are not particularly good with designing products or coding them or figuring out how they’re going to be viable to build a business.

Of course there are lots of exceptions to this; That’s not the point.

The point is that another outsider, venturing into industry mixers and trying to get a handle on the situation, would probably come to similar conclusions: There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who have set out to build nothing but frivolous widgets to waste peoples’ time in new and interesting ways. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but if that’s what it looks like from the outside then maybe Web 2.0 has an image problem.

What do you think? Leave a comment, or email me if you want to write an article for Startupism.

Aaron Nemoyten is Designer Supreme With Cheese for Shockapps.