> it pretty much does the opposite. I don't imagine that this will be a popular comment on here Silicon Valley and HN talk the talk of innovation, but they bac

> it pretty much does the opposite. I don't imagine that this will be a popular comment on here Silicon Valley and HN talk the talk of innovation, but they back monopolists. Time and again you will see this. Peter Thiel argues for this in his "Competition Is For Losers" talk. The constant theme is this: we want innovation so far as it can bring about abrupt and massive growth and lead to a single company dominating a market. Uber, AirBnb, Facebook, Google, Amazon. These are all businesses backed by VC that are by design monopolies. They create the market and own it. Or, like Uber and AirBnb, they overturn the old order and toss up a wall around it. Profit is at odds with competition. Once a business reaches a certain size, the organization no longer needs innovation. It's much easier to buy rather than build. Building requires figuring out product-market-fit and it's much cheaper and faster to buy a company that already figured that out. That's also why you can have a world-class R&D lab like Xerox and see all of your innovations brought to market by outsiders (Apple + Microsoft in the '80s). Your organization is not necessarily equipped to understand how to utilize the innovations it creates. It doesn't understand how to sell or market the inventions. So it doesn't. > If you truly want innovation, then what you need to do is to take away the personal cost of failure We already reduce financial risk with bankruptcy laws. Reducing risk is one thing, but if you lean too far into that with VC money you can end up with WeWork or Theranos. Or any of the 2000s dot-com. Businesses that are little more than inflating worthless assets for some fraudulent payoff. Reducing risk isn't the key. You need skin in the game. But more important, you need people with drive. People that like winning more than they hate losing.