Most of the time, game changers don't look like game changers when they first start. So they're often dismissed as being trivial. It's true for anything that we

Most of the time, game changers don't look like game changers when they first start. So they're often dismissed as being trivial. It's true for anything that we depend upon today. cars, radio, tv, computers, internet, social networks, twitter, etc. Most people, investors (and myself) included, are also not the most imaginative bunch. You can't hope to raise money from things that are more than one hop away from things that they know. And lastly, innovation from a startup's perspective, is almost never a brilliant flash of insight. It's usually a gradual iterative process of discovery and learning that looks like a brilliant flash of insight in hindsight, especially to people re-telling the story. Everyone wants to hear about what was going on when the meteoric rise was happening (relatively short time), as opposed to all the time spent laying the ground work and exploration and deadends beforehand (relatively long time). You can only hope to do iterative discovery before breaking the ground somewhere. What the author complains about lack of innovation is really just what innovation looks like on the ground--feeling around in the dark. You have a better chance of finding something if you work from where you know, rather than just taking a giant hop. And really, innovation is never immediately obvious. It usually is just an inkling--a tickle. On a macro level, innovation has flashes in the number of people that are working on it. Lots of people are doing groupon "clones" because it's still an area where variants are to be explored. If you think about us as a colony of ants, we're all looking for food (ideas), and once we find some, we'll exhaust that before looking for more. Where there is food is likely to be more food. It's not exactly a bad strategy.