This article raises a lot of interesting, disquieting thoughts about the Valley and its startup/VC culture. But change isn't going to come from within, because

This article raises a lot of interesting, disquieting thoughts about the Valley and its startup/VC culture. But change isn't going to come from within, because there is no present incentive for change. Why should VCs stop pushing for quick acquisitions and exits, when they're making damned good money on those exits? Why should founders want to stray from the prevailing model, when the prevailing model minimizes their risk and increases their chances of big paydays (not to mention repeat performances)? In a lot of ways, today's system seems to be working remarkably well for its participants on both sides of the equation. Arguably better than previous iterations of Valley culture and systems have. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that the system is designed to reward its participants, and perhaps even at the expense of users or the "greater good" -- however narrowly or broadly we want to define that term. But this is just a hypothesis until we can substantiate it. Are there other regions, within and without the US, breaking SV's stranglehold on game-changing innovation? Has a competitive innovation-generating model arisen to challenge, if not shake up, the SV model? It's almost impossible to measure the success of SV's "greater good" on absolute terms, and as such, we must search for relativistic points of comparison. Measuring SV today versus What SV Could Be is fruitless without a tangible example of the latter, or else a prescriptive model of some sort.