18 ms·

The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation

262 points by coloneltcb 14y ago

kevinalexbrown 14y ago
Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious. I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products. For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we want these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms. I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy-to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes). (b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project. My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget-startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products? It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that? [0](http://invo.northwestern.edu/about http://invo.northwestern.edu/about) [1](http://cd2.northwestern.edu/ http://cd2.northwestern.edu/)
- philwelch 14y ago
  There are no more tech startups. There are startups that use technology, but writing CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars isn't developing new technology.
  - zaidf 14y ago
    Define "tech startups".
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - nostrademons 14y ago
    That's no more true now than it was 15 years ago. There're startups doing amazing things with depth cameras, motion capture, computer vision, robotics, large-scale databases, multimedia processing, collaborative filtering, and so on. They are, of course, a tiny minority of all startups, but that's because it will always be easier to write CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars than to develop genuinely new technology. I remember a quote from Larry or Sergey back in the early days of Google (before the dot-com implosion) that was to the effect of "Do any of those other tech startups have any actual technology?" It's always been like this - wannabes hoping to get rich quickly outnumber the genuine innovators. It doesn't mean the latter group doesn't exist, only that you have to work to find them.
  - ephermata 14y ago
    What optimization tasks do Exec and Uber solve to provide the quality of service their customers expect?
- redwood 14y ago
  I'll be honest: I'm not clear on what the question at the end is. Are you saying: it's not easy to turn academic research concepts into commercial products? Well this is precisely what Silicon Valley has learned to do better than anywhere else. If you're asking how we can make the process better, doesn't it boil down to having investors who see the value of these ideas? You need to frame the business case to them in their lingo. If they don't want to invest in you because they think the can make more money on BS web investments, then we're all losing. But ultimately there will be a shakeout in web investments...and then there will be a shift back.
sultezdukes 14y ago
"The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation" Wrong title. It's "I, James Temple, have a different political philosophy than these guys".
rayiner 14y ago
"That's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer." Reasonable and astute point. "An Economist article this year exploring the state of innovation noted that centuries of scientific progress means it takes ever longer for people to reach to the frontier of any field, much less push past it. It also stressed that much of the technological low-hanging fruit is long gone." Also true, and oft-overlooked. "Thiel is at least putting his money where his mouth is at Founders Fund, his venture capital firm making investments into robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (alongside a lineup of dot-coms)." Ironically, AI was jump-started by DOD dollars,[1] and biotechnology by NIH dollars. Robotics had substantial manufacturing implications and got money from that area, but has also benefited heavily from defense money (think UAV's, etc). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cuts_of_the_early_.2770s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cut...
- crusso 14y ago
  When you're spending billions/trillions of tax dollars, you're going to have successes here and there. There's no question that the government has some successes to point to. I actually agree that government is decent at some basic research. Then again, the private sector has had plenty of successes as well. My main objection is that we don't really understand the opportunity cost of having the government spend the money vs letting the private economy do so itself - yet we let the government continue to make the decisions on what's fair.
- hencq 14y ago
  The article makes that exact point: > Only governments had the long view and available cash to fund things like supercolliders, deep space programs and - oh yeah - the development of the Internet.
  - dreamdu5t 14y ago
    Thats not true. There was no long view government plan to create what we now call the Internet.
kmfrk 14y ago
Evgeny Morozov wrote a must-read book review that deals with this bloviating mentality: http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_05/10825 http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_05/10825. Can't wait to read his upcoming book on the subject.
- corford 14y ago
  That is one hell of a review. Thanks for the link.
  - kmfrk 14y ago
    Morozov is generally a person you'll want to follow. He's a great modern intellectual. His TED take-down is pure gold, too: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted-khanna http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/1.... I submitted his book review a while ago, if people want to discuss it at length. I imagine it'll ruffle the feathers of no small amount of people on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346781 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346781. :)
    - bitcartel 14y ago
      Eddie Huang describes TED as a 'Scientology summer camp'. He's not quite as eloquent as Morozov but entertaining nonetheless with interesting details about what TED fellows get up to. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      Excellent stuff. BTW the New Republic has a beautifully clean reading UI - the site has the same feel of Instapaper or ReadItLater - seems like they decided 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'
- pron 14y ago
  Thanks. I like his analysis, but particularly liked this interesting bit: 'Consider a 2011 survey by a British insurance company in which 11 percent of respondents claimed to have seen an incident but chose not to report it, worried that higher crime statistics for their neighborhood would significantly reduce the value of their properties. In this case, the quality of future data is intricately dependent on how much of the current data is disclosed; unconditional “openness” is the wrong move here—precisely because of feedback loops.'
pbreit 14y ago
Author could have mentioned that Tesla and SpaceX received sizable government funding.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
andyl 14y ago
"Silicon Valley loves to talk big about innovation; it's just not as good at following through." BS. Computing, Networking, Biotech, Internet, and more. Silicon Valley has delivered, and there is more to come. Not every new investment is going to change the world. But collectively, the track record is very strong.
- trotsky 14y ago
  do you really believe those things were created in or by silicon valley? Even beyond their public pasts, their early private champions like Bell Labs, BBN and IBM weren't from california nor private equity backed.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Well Xerox PARC was in Palo Alto, though Xerox itself is based on Rochester, NY. And Xerox was of course not a VC-backed company. Intel, however, was founded in Santa Clara and was VC-backed. Though your point is well-taken. I think big corporate R&D labs are responsible for far more of the innovation we see in the internet sector than VC-backed Silicon Valley companies. If we're talking about narratives, indeed, the narrative that seems more prevalent is actually a big company that has a cash cow (e.g. Xerox with copiers, AT&T with the telephone network) having money to throw around at R&D activity.
    - joonix 14y ago
      IBM Watson is IMO a huge embarrassment for SV.
- jw_ 14y ago
  You are aware that all the technology you mention was initially produced by government-funded research or research labs in monopolies (Bell), no?
OGinparadise 14y ago
Another thing: as companies get larger they will try to squeeze competitors, fire employees and do everything possible to increase their margins. Legal, but they shouldn't brag about it. Edited to add: Apple, Microsoft and Google alone have close to $250 Billion in the bank, $250,000,000,000 and what we hear each quarter about them? Increased margins, more and more ads, increased prices on software, anti-competitive behavior, essentially cheating on taxes, firing 20% of employees (Motorola) and holding cash overseas not to bring it to US due to taxes. It never ends, they have to be ready for the next quarter
- bitserf 14y ago
  Or my favorite, buying revenue through acquisitions and then asking existing employees to take one for the team with pay freezes and austerity measures because of the subsequent impact to margin.
- saraid216 14y ago
  I keep hearing about self-driving cars...
  - OGinparadise 14y ago
    Oh, you must've heard about BMW, Audi and other car manufacturers that can't match Google's PR machine http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self-driving-cars-everyday-reality-article-1.1251048 http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self-driving-cars-ev...
    - saraid216 14y ago
      I've heard about them, too, but when I find the relevance of your point, I'll drop you a line.
mgkimsal 14y ago
"Time to drop the pretense" But if you drop the pretense, how will you continue to convince everyone that SV is the center of the tech universe and that everything worthwhile that happens must originate or migrate to those few square miles on the planet?
Cardeck1 14y ago
I agree with the article.True innovation is hard to find.Look at the startups promoted by incubators.Most of them are some sort of apps.We definitely need pure innovation, something so different, that will change all our lives. And you can see here the difference between an idea-man and an innovator.Because in my opinion an idea-man can have good ideas and make some money out of them but an innovator will have brilliant ideas, passion to build something extraordinary, smart, without money being the first priority.His goal is to change the world.Now that is someone I would like to work with, not the typical I-have-an-idea-you-build-it-and-I-will-come-later-to-see-whatsup.
31reasons 14y ago
Lets make it illegal to start a photo/location/$%^ sharing startup. That will clear the space upto 80%. I am just kidding, please don't down vote me if you are running such startup.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  Anyone building those companies - as of about 6 month ago - are going to be in trouble anyway.
pastaking 14y ago
Just like Levchin, we can find this article inspiring, but neither has hard numbers to back up their claim. Sure, we see a trend that there are a lot of innovations in the ways we communicate, share, and connect, but does that necessarily mean we're lacking "deep" technological innovation? Personally I think web & mobile startups are getting easier to create so more people are becoming entrepreneurs to take advantage of that; the pie is getting bigger. I believe there are still plenty of "deep" tech innovators out there along with investors who believe in them. Perhaps these "deep" tech innovators don't get much media coverage because they don't need it, therefore we don't usually hear about them.
BummerCloud 14y ago
Clayton Christensen was profiled in Wired recently and came to a similar conclusion: "We’ve encouraged managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make more money with fewer resources. But what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently the world is awash in capital but the innovations we need to advance aren’t there." http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen-wants-to-transform-capitalism/all/ http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen...
NoPiece 14y ago
I think the critique would be more pointed if he could highlight a backlog of great ideas that Silicon Valley refused to fund. The money is available if you have a big idea. There is plenty going on in Silicon Valley outside photo sharing from biotech to microfinance to clean energy.
- gnosis 14y ago
  Well, you could start (for example) with these lists of unsolved problems in physics[1] and math[2]. I'm sure similar lists exist for every science. Of course, private industry is interested in funding research in to next to none of them (at least not nearly to the extent that it is in problems that have immediate profitable applications). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathemati...
frozenport 14y ago
Silicon Valley has shifted from hardware to software, this is the real story. New hardware matches our understanding of innovation significantly more than software.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
"But these aren't free market aberrations brought on by regulations. They're the invisible hand of capitalism itself: reaching out for quick gains while avoiding as much downside risk as possible." Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis. Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point. So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways. You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information. Yeah, every now and then somebody does this one thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place. This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a goal that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough. I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind. If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car. If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.
fl3tch 14y ago
If you want to make a difference, quit trying to cash out as a 25 year old millionaire. Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end. But the people who succeed change the world. Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.
- msutherl 14y ago
  Is this the only way to make a big difference? I would love to see something like a guide to making a difference in the world. What are the major archetypes of such people? For instance, what of the managers who brought together the teams of PhD's to do the work – are they not just as important as the Nobel winners? And how does one become such a manager?
- jjsz 14y ago
  Really? I think you shouldn't come up in here telling people that cashing out at 25 doesn't make a 'real' difference. There are people who prefer life experience, over work and research experience. There are people who rather invest in other people taking that risk, than taking the risk themselves. Everybody's different. The millionaires are the ones paying for your research work. So when someone like you spends 30 years chasing their dreams after acquiring a PhD and fail-- they have more-or-less acquired a different way of thinking about things. Right? They gain a different self, a different sense of awareness. They gain a specialization of some niche topic. I get it. Researchers change the world theoretically. The thing is doing research and influencing others to think differently is the same thing as influencing people with products or services. They all have the same goal, to change the way people think about a topic or way of doing things. It isn't tied down to one route. Because interestingly, MOST millionaire's become philanthropists. And they are not interested in retiring either. And like how the top comment said, it's not one big disruption that changes things, it's the succession of little bits of implementations or modrnizations of products, services, and ideals. All in harmony. One branch isn't worth worshiping more than the other branch. I know you were targeting the people who retire and enjoy life, without investing or donating back but there's a world out there to see and not everybody gets bored with it at the same rate as you do. Edit: Some people like to manage and become overseers, they get the thrill of life from that, you can't tell them they're doing it wrong, that they should quit and enjoy life. That will bring anarchy and chaos. The same thing with a whole bunch of people sitting in a laboratory. I remember reading a book that went over this topic, about people being programmed to work in the laboratory. There were different levels, and Level B's worked in the lab. The book isn't coming back to me..It was where one level were giving audios while they sleep to acknowledge their inferiority. What a book, if I find out what it was I have to re-read it.
SqMafia 14y ago
Can people stop taking one data point and using that to extrapolate to a large group? This is pretty bad journalism. Sure, OK story telling but it's not exactly the truth.
a_p 14y ago
David Wheeler has an interesting list of what he considers to be important software innovations. [1] Most of the innovations listed occurred in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. An interesting quote from an article[2] about an interview with Linus Torvalds in LWN.net: "A member of the audience asked Linus to describe his single most memorable moment from the last 20 years. Linus responded that he didn't really have one; the kernel is the result of lots of small ideas contributed by lots of people over a long time. There has been no big "ah ha!" moment. He went on to describe a pet peeve of his with regard to the technology industry: there is a great deal of talk about "innovation" and "vision." People want to hear about the one big idea that changes the world, but that's not how the world works. It's not about visionary ideas; it's about lots of good ideas which do not seem world-changing at the time, but which turn out to be great after lots of sweat and work have been applied." [1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/445687/ https://lwn.net/Articles/445687/
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  Along those lines, the BBC documentary "The Story of Science" shows over its episodes that this is true. It's really a fantastically intellectual series and well worth acquiring and watching.
buss 14y ago
> Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics Incidentally, if you'd like to actually turn terabytes of genomic data into actionable medical information, Counsyl is hiring software developers https://jobs.counsyl.com https://jobs.counsyl.com
ohwp 14y ago
Maybe the problem is that innovation and invention are mixed up all the time. The CD was a great invention while Apple is an innovative company. I'm not sure this is correct but I think that innovations remove risks while inventions are always risky or don't bother to think about risks. Edit: to make myself more clear: I think that innovations are about renewal and inventions are about new. Some examples (in my eyes): Apple is innovative, IBM is inventive.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Silicon Valley used to be a place with cheap land where people went because the cost of living was low, and they could tinker with cool ideas whereas, in the expensive East Coast cities, they'd have to work themselves to death just to tread water. California was this place where you could come and do cool stuff and build on land the East Coast elite didn't want. It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's why urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city per se) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness. Enter VC, which connects people with the resources (funding) to try out their ideas and, better yet, enough resources that they have a "rocket fuel" advantage over any competitors. Over time, the VCs and "tech press" became king-makers. Then, the well-connected became a new, informal, executive suite who care more about protecting each other than genuine competition. Hence, VC-istan. It's the first postmodern corporation, cleverly designed to look like a free market. Reputable investors are the executive suite. People with the authority to write welfare-checks-I-mean-acqhires at big companies are The Compensation Board because they decide on bonuses. "Tech press" are another part of the HR department that writes performance reviews. So-called startup "CEOs" are semi-independent PMs. Software engineers are peons who work long hours because they haven't figured out yet that they work at a big company and aren't actually going to getting investor contact and made founders in 7.35 months-- that was a degenerate empty promise. VC-istan has clever marketing. It doesn't look like a stodgy corporate behemoth, but it is. That is why it has ceased to innovate.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's why urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city per se) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness. Many of the world's top cities are expensive as all hell, but in the American case at least it's largely because you're simply not allowed to build denser dwellings. Silicon Valley is stuck with huge towns full of two-story single-family housing in an area where demand can easily support multifamily apartment buildings :-/.
redwood 14y ago
This whole discussion boils down to whether the 'big' ideas can be considered to come from software or not. If they only come from hardware, e.g. infrastructure/energy/poverty-changing, then sure they take longer to create, and have higher risk. But we are making progress on them. On the software side there is of course big innovation, admittedly hard to quantify. The internet has changed the human experience in more profound ways than many physical innovations ever did.
csomar 14y ago
There is a clear hostility toward digital products. If a physical product that shows up a screen in the air (holoscreen) to Skype another person, all people would suddenly scream: OH, that's innovation. Yet Skyping through an LCD screen gives the same result. If BMW or Tesla design a futuristic looking key for a car, we call that innovation and cool. But a nice designed interface, is just another interface. If some scientists burn a whole lot of money* to analyze DNA data, we call that innovation and science. However, when app ABC tries to connect people and do some social work, we call that another social app and a Facebook clone. Please stop the hostility. Creating a new API library or writing code that does something new is indeed "Innovation". It's certainly not getting to the moon, but it's still a very little bit of innovation. The new Internet enabled me, from a small third-world country to create a sizable income (at least comparing to my country per capita), learn a "LOT" and build a viable business. Internet put aside, I have no chance of making even $1000/year in my country. That, and the fact that I started from exactly nothing (family computer) is for me this decade "miracle". The innovation in payments, digital products, advertising... have improved access to wealth and mobility. I guess, the problem of the majority of people is access to wealth. There is too much wealth around (look at the majority of jobs, they are about moving wealth and not creating it e.g. doctors, lawyers, gov., traders, brokers, middle men...). Access to wealth will improve the life of the average person more than accessing the moon. The Internet offers an unmatched opportunity to access wealth. Please innovate in HTML, JavaScript and Servers. * I'm not nitpicking on data scientists or any body, just to give an example.
DaniFong 14y ago
For what it's worth, in my experience the people talking about big innovation, actually ARE extremely supportive of genuine, plausible efforts at producing planetary scale improvements. In our case, we're trying to solve the economical energy storage problem (lightsail.com) These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections. Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include: Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates --- By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them. So I think people are at least trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try! I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty. If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas. There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on. People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail. There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days. --- I would welcome any hard data to the contrary.
jenkinsj 14y ago
I very similar view on advertising was expressed by David Copeland not to long ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832538
pg 14y ago
These articles are easy to write (and upvote) but such conclusions are pretty meaningless till you have a definition of what counts as innovation. That's a very interesting question, and yet just about everyone who talks about this topic ducks it and goes instead for the easy score. Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things that fly through the air are innovative, and invisible software isn't) is mistaken. But what would a good measure be?
- jusben1369 14y ago
  It's true. But also somewhat reminiscent of the "What is a startup?" discussion a few months back which was inconclusive. It seems "everyone knows what it is but no one can explain it" But to take a stab at it I'd say the level of innovation is directly tied to the amount of economic improvement and/or life improvement that results. Internet = huge change in economic efficiencies and life improvement. ("Life improvement" would have to be related to time free'ed up to spend on other goals) Mobile the same.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  I would say that delta on how people live their daily lives (maybe in time-affected or some other similar metric) is probably close.
- danielpal 14y ago
  I used to view innovation as: making it possible to do something that wasn't possible before (going from 0 to 1). But under that definition alone, SpaceX would not be very innovative. It's just sometimes when you go from 1 to N but the N is so large (like SpaceX case) it's probably a different kind of innovation. And by making the N that large, it's starts to look a lot like 0-1 and new opportunities arise, like the chance of getting to Mars (which is definitely 0-1)
  - akiselev 14y ago
    There are certain fields where everything is pretty much 0 to 1. Designing a nuclear reactor or an orbital rocket is an incredible feat of engineering, even if you have half a century or more of work to fall back on.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jacoblyles 14y ago
If you are considering a new startup idea and you think "that sounds easy, I can build it in a month", then you are most likely entering a crowded market where your startup will not add much marginal value to the world. This is most consumer startups. If instead, your idea makes you say "That sounds hard. I'm going to have to overcome technical challenges/ accumulate domain expertise/ leap regulatory hurdles" then you are most likely breaking new ground, adding significant value to society, and creating something hard to copy. As much as I am happy for the success of the snapchats of the world (and the army of snapchat clones), I don't think the world would miss them very much if they were gone.
ghaff 14y ago
I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to also check out the cover story from Technology Review a few months back: "Why we can't solve big problems." http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-... It touches on issues with the VC investment model but brings in a lot more as well.
RougeFemme 14y ago
I think another relatively recent development - last 20 years or so - hindering innovation is the proliferation of "Wall street analysts" and their quarterly projections which focus comapnies on the very short-term. . .at least publicly-traded companies. They can do well, but if they don't do as well as "the analysts" projected then they are deemed failures who must do some soul-searching, cost-cutting, etc.
snambi 14y ago
Completely agree with this. Very very rarely any real innovation happens. Most of the time financial success is viewed as innovation. It may innovation in terms of business. But hard to say they are innovation on a scale that is more universal.
graycat 14y ago
The article points to some problems, and there are some. But the article also has some problems. Here is an easier explanation: First, the entrepreneurs are not bringing the venture partners enough projects with good, powerful, valuable innovation. Second, the venture partners do not want to evaluate innovation and, instead, want to evaluate 'traction'. They want to see traction significant and growing rapidly. This concentration on traction may come mostly from demands of the limited partners. A failing of the article is that it didn't explain the crucial role of traction. Third, as in the article, there are some cliches about 'innovation': It's very expensive in time and money, very risky, done for its own sake just for the fun of seeing amazing things, is from dedication to change the world and not for ROI, is impossible to evaluate, is largely separated from business and reality, etc. To save space here, I omit 1-1 pairings of each of these cliches with parts of the article. Exercise: Do the pairings. Hint: They all exist. So, it is easy for the venture partners to be afraid of innovation, to fear that it is an interest and direction in conflict with ROI and not an advantage. With this fear, traction and innovation are worth at most just the traction alone and otherwise maybe significantly less. Fourth, information technology (IT) entrepreneurship, from both sides of the table, has a problem with 'patterns': There aren't useful ones easy to see just from the past 40 years. Why? The examples of big successes are, say, Square, PInterest, InstaGram, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, HotMail, Cisco, Oracle, Seagate, HP, Dell, ..., Microsoft, Intel. So, get such a big win maybe less than once a year; in 10 years get only a few big wins; then in the next 10 years technology has changed so much that the empirical patterns from the past 10 years don't work very well. Fifth, the cliches in the article about technology are too pessimistic. E.g., if innovation in technology is so risky and unpredictable, then how come it has done so much in the last 40 years? I mean, we're talking a 3.0 GHz 8 core processor for less than $200, main memory for $10/GB, a 3 TB hard disk for $135, 1 GbE on each motherboard, 100 GbE on one wavelength on a fiber with dozens of wavelengths, etc. No, there are some reliable 'patterns' as illustrated by the technology advances. The pattern? Pick a pair of a problem and a solution. The problem should be such that a good or much better solution will get eager users/customers (want no doubts about 'product/market fit'). For the crucial solution, innovate, e.g., do some research in applied mathematics, applied science, or engineering. How to do such research? There is education for that, long heavily funded mostly for US national security. The education is available at the top two dozen or so US research universities and is called a Ph.D. For more on this 'pattern', look at the progress in IT of the last 40 years, say, from when Intel got going, along with what the US DoD has done starting early in WWII to the present. Risky? Not really: Mostly can eliminate nearly all the risk with just good technical work just on paper. And before that paper is written, one of the lessons usually learned in a good Ph.D. program is how to pick a suitable problem where 'suitable' means can get results that are "new, correct, and significant" with the meager time and other resources available to a Ph.D. student. For the needed innovation just want "new, correct, significant, powerful, and valuable" for the needed solution within the time and money available. Expensive? Not always. DoD and NASA projects tend to be expensive due to some heavy hardware, but not all innovation is expensive. E.g., RSA. But generally the crucial work should be done and on paper in good form before allocating a lot of resources. The solution? IT entrepreneurs need to do better innovation with nearly all the risk removed by work just on paper (or in PDF). The venture partners, if they want to invest, need to be willing to evaluate work on paper and invest at that 'stage'. But there is now a threat to the venture partners: Now the computing is so cheap that by the time a project has the traction that venture partners want to see, there is a good chance that the project is already nicely profitable. E.g., suppose an entrepreneur does some innovation to get a powerful, valuable solution to a big problem and brings up a Web site to deliver the solution on the Internet. Then look at the Meeker data at KPCB and average her CPM figures for mobile and desktop and get $2.125. Assume the Web site gets users enough to send 2 Web pages a second with 4 ads per page. Then in one month the revenue would be 2.125 * 4 * 2 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 44,064 dollars. If each Web page sends for 400,000 bits, the upload bandwidth needed is commonly available in US living rooms from a cable TV company. It is likely that a computer with less than $2000 in parts is sufficient as a server. And can consider using cloud servers. So, we're looking at a project with a $2000 chunk of hardware, an Internet connection, with phone and TV, for less than $200 a month, one or a few founders, and $44,064 a month in revenue. Now why should such a project, sending 2 Web pages a second and getting $44,064 a month in revenue. call a venture partner or return a venture partner's call? Yes, this scenario has not yet resulted in a lot of big wins, but the threat to venture capital and the opportunity to entrepreneurs is just sitting there. Likely one good example is the romantic matchmaking Web site in Canada, Plenty of Fish, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. An established pattern? No. Obvious? Yes. Note that I am saying that the opportunity is to (1) get a Ph.D. in applied math, applied physical science, or engineering from a good research university, (2) pick a pair of an important problem and a good or much better solution where the solution can be generated from software running on servers and delivered to users/customers over the Internet, (3) for the solution do some innovation, that is, some research in applied math, applied physical science, or engineering, (4) write the software, plug together the server(5), bring up the Web site, go live, get publicity, users/customers, ads, revenue, and earnings, and grow. For the venture partners, they can (1) stay with their current ROI, significantly less good than an index fund, (2) look for more mobile, social, local, sharing apps for teenage girls to gossip and look for boyfriends, or (3) get serious about innovation and encouraging and evaluating it and then funding its exploitation. No, venture partners should not invest in research, but they likely will need to get quite serious once the research is solid on paper and, in particular, drop their scorn, contempt, ridicule, and phobia about research. Funding based just on paper? That's how nearly all large engineering projects, DoD projects, etc. get done. Net, for what is crucial about innovation, paper is fine.
tyang 14y ago
This article stirs the pot but is flawed. Low hanging fruit gone? Proof? And how is that relevant? If you want to innovate, do it. Figure it out. Stop blaming investors or the government. Blame yourself and fix yourself so you are doing the kind of innovation you want to, even it is part-time, initially. Go be a professor at Caltech, MIT, Stanford or Berkeley and work on the hardest problems in science and technology and innovate. Go work for Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Innovate yourself. Stop trying to "kill it" as you Lean-Startup your way to a billion dollar company. And stop whining. :)
stretchwithme 14y ago
Whenever fundamental innovation is successful and a huge platform is created, it is followed by the creation of companies that exploit that platform. That may take away from more fundamental innovation in the short term but creates more resources to pursue them in the long term. Its nothing to be concerned about.
shmerl 14y ago
To boost innovation US needs to abolish software patents and significantly rework the whole sick patent system.

262 points by coloneltcb 14y ago

Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious. I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products. For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we want these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms. I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy-to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes). (b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project. My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget-startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products? It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that? [0](http://invo.northwestern.edu/about http://invo.northwestern.edu/about) [1](http://cd2.northwestern.edu/ http://cd2.northwestern.edu/)

philwelch 14y ago
There are no more tech startups. There are startups that use technology, but writing CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars isn't developing new technology.
- zaidf 14y ago
  Define "tech startups".
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- nostrademons 14y ago
  That's no more true now than it was 15 years ago. There're startups doing amazing things with depth cameras, motion capture, computer vision, robotics, large-scale databases, multimedia processing, collaborative filtering, and so on. They are, of course, a tiny minority of all startups, but that's because it will always be easier to write CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars than to develop genuinely new technology. I remember a quote from Larry or Sergey back in the early days of Google (before the dot-com implosion) that was to the effect of "Do any of those other tech startups have any actual technology?" It's always been like this - wannabes hoping to get rich quickly outnumber the genuine innovators. It doesn't mean the latter group doesn't exist, only that you have to work to find them.
- ephermata 14y ago
  What optimization tasks do Exec and Uber solve to provide the quality of service their customers expect?
redwood 14y ago
I'll be honest: I'm not clear on what the question at the end is. Are you saying: it's not easy to turn academic research concepts into commercial products? Well this is precisely what Silicon Valley has learned to do better than anywhere else. If you're asking how we can make the process better, doesn't it boil down to having investors who see the value of these ideas? You need to frame the business case to them in their lingo. If they don't want to invest in you because they think the can make more money on BS web investments, then we're all losing. But ultimately there will be a shakeout in web investments...and then there will be a shift back.

sultezdukes 14y ago

"The hypocrisy in Silicon Valley's big talk on innovation" Wrong title. It's "I, James Temple, have a different political philosophy than these guys".

rayiner 14y ago

"That's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer." Reasonable and astute point. "An Economist article this year exploring the state of innovation noted that centuries of scientific progress means it takes ever longer for people to reach to the frontier of any field, much less push past it. It also stressed that much of the technological low-hanging fruit is long gone." Also true, and oft-overlooked. "Thiel is at least putting his money where his mouth is at Founders Fund, his venture capital firm making investments into robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (alongside a lineup of dot-coms)." Ironically, AI was jump-started by DOD dollars,[1] and biotechnology by NIH dollars. Robotics had substantial manufacturing implications and got money from that area, but has also benefited heavily from defense money (think UAV's, etc). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cuts_of_the_early_.2770s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cut...

crusso 14y ago
When you're spending billions/trillions of tax dollars, you're going to have successes here and there. There's no question that the government has some successes to point to. I actually agree that government is decent at some basic research. Then again, the private sector has had plenty of successes as well. My main objection is that we don't really understand the opportunity cost of having the government spend the money vs letting the private economy do so itself - yet we let the government continue to make the decisions on what's fair.
hencq 14y ago
The article makes that exact point: > Only governments had the long view and available cash to fund things like supercolliders, deep space programs and - oh yeah - the development of the Internet.
- dreamdu5t 14y ago
  Thats not true. There was no long view government plan to create what we now call the Internet.

kmfrk 14y ago

Evgeny Morozov wrote a must-read book review that deals with this bloviating mentality: http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_05/10825 http://bookforum.com/inprint/019_05/10825. Can't wait to read his upcoming book on the subject.

corford 14y ago
That is one hell of a review. Thanks for the link.
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Morozov is generally a person you'll want to follow. He's a great modern intellectual. His TED take-down is pure gold, too: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/105703/the-naked-and-the-ted-khanna http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/1.... I submitted his book review a while ago, if people want to discuss it at length. I imagine it'll ruffle the feathers of no small amount of people on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346781 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5346781. :)
  - bitcartel 14y ago
    Eddie Huang describes TED as a 'Scientology summer camp'. He's not quite as eloquent as Morozov but entertaining nonetheless with interesting details about what TED fellows get up to. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hwLMBdnbXk
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Excellent stuff. BTW the New Republic has a beautifully clean reading UI - the site has the same feel of Instapaper or ReadItLater - seems like they decided 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'
pron 14y ago
Thanks. I like his analysis, but particularly liked this interesting bit: 'Consider a 2011 survey by a British insurance company in which 11 percent of respondents claimed to have seen an incident but chose not to report it, worried that higher crime statistics for their neighborhood would significantly reduce the value of their properties. In this case, the quality of future data is intricately dependent on how much of the current data is disclosed; unconditional “openness” is the wrong move here—precisely because of feedback loops.'

pbreit 14y ago

Author could have mentioned that Tesla and SpaceX received sizable government funding.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

andyl 14y ago

"Silicon Valley loves to talk big about innovation; it's just not as good at following through." BS. Computing, Networking, Biotech, Internet, and more. Silicon Valley has delivered, and there is more to come. Not every new investment is going to change the world. But collectively, the track record is very strong.

trotsky 14y ago
do you really believe those things were created in or by silicon valley? Even beyond their public pasts, their early private champions like Bell Labs, BBN and IBM weren't from california nor private equity backed.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 14y ago
  Well Xerox PARC was in Palo Alto, though Xerox itself is based on Rochester, NY. And Xerox was of course not a VC-backed company. Intel, however, was founded in Santa Clara and was VC-backed. Though your point is well-taken. I think big corporate R&D labs are responsible for far more of the innovation we see in the internet sector than VC-backed Silicon Valley companies. If we're talking about narratives, indeed, the narrative that seems more prevalent is actually a big company that has a cash cow (e.g. Xerox with copiers, AT&T with the telephone network) having money to throw around at R&D activity.
  - joonix 14y ago
    IBM Watson is IMO a huge embarrassment for SV.
jw_ 14y ago
You are aware that all the technology you mention was initially produced by government-funded research or research labs in monopolies (Bell), no?

OGinparadise 14y ago

Another thing: as companies get larger they will try to squeeze competitors, fire employees and do everything possible to increase their margins. Legal, but they shouldn't brag about it. Edited to add: Apple, Microsoft and Google alone have close to $250 Billion in the bank, $250,000,000,000 and what we hear each quarter about them? Increased margins, more and more ads, increased prices on software, anti-competitive behavior, essentially cheating on taxes, firing 20% of employees (Motorola) and holding cash overseas not to bring it to US due to taxes. It never ends, they have to be ready for the next quarter

bitserf 14y ago
Or my favorite, buying revenue through acquisitions and then asking existing employees to take one for the team with pay freezes and austerity measures because of the subsequent impact to margin.
saraid216 14y ago
I keep hearing about self-driving cars...
- OGinparadise 14y ago
  Oh, you must've heard about BMW, Audi and other car manufacturers that can't match Google's PR machine http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self-driving-cars-everyday-reality-article-1.1251048 http://www.nydailynews.com/autos/making-self-driving-cars-ev...
  - saraid216 14y ago
    I've heard about them, too, but when I find the relevance of your point, I'll drop you a line.

mgkimsal 14y ago

"Time to drop the pretense" But if you drop the pretense, how will you continue to convince everyone that SV is the center of the tech universe and that everything worthwhile that happens must originate or migrate to those few square miles on the planet?

Cardeck1 14y ago

I agree with the article.True innovation is hard to find.Look at the startups promoted by incubators.Most of them are some sort of apps.We definitely need pure innovation, something so different, that will change all our lives. And you can see here the difference between an idea-man and an innovator.Because in my opinion an idea-man can have good ideas and make some money out of them but an innovator will have brilliant ideas, passion to build something extraordinary, smart, without money being the first priority.His goal is to change the world.Now that is someone I would like to work with, not the typical I-have-an-idea-you-build-it-and-I-will-come-later-to-see-whatsup.

31reasons 14y ago

Lets make it illegal to start a photo/location/$%^ sharing startup. That will clear the space upto 80%. I am just kidding, please don't down vote me if you are running such startup.

pbiggar 14y ago
Anyone building those companies - as of about 6 month ago - are going to be in trouble anyway.

pastaking 14y ago

Just like Levchin, we can find this article inspiring, but neither has hard numbers to back up their claim. Sure, we see a trend that there are a lot of innovations in the ways we communicate, share, and connect, but does that necessarily mean we're lacking "deep" technological innovation? Personally I think web & mobile startups are getting easier to create so more people are becoming entrepreneurs to take advantage of that; the pie is getting bigger. I believe there are still plenty of "deep" tech innovators out there along with investors who believe in them. Perhaps these "deep" tech innovators don't get much media coverage because they don't need it, therefore we don't usually hear about them.

BummerCloud 14y ago

Clayton Christensen was profiled in Wired recently and came to a similar conclusion: "We’ve encouraged managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make more money with fewer resources. But what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently the world is awash in capital but the innovations we need to advance aren’t there." http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen-wants-to-transform-capitalism/all/ http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen...

NoPiece 14y ago

I think the critique would be more pointed if he could highlight a backlog of great ideas that Silicon Valley refused to fund. The money is available if you have a big idea. There is plenty going on in Silicon Valley outside photo sharing from biotech to microfinance to clean energy.

gnosis 14y ago
Well, you could start (for example) with these lists of unsolved problems in physics[1] and math[2]. I'm sure similar lists exist for every science. Of course, private industry is interested in funding research in to next to none of them (at least not nearly to the extent that it is in problems that have immediate profitable applications). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathemati...

frozenport 14y ago

Silicon Valley has shifted from hardware to software, this is the real story. New hardware matches our understanding of innovation significantly more than software.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

"But these aren't free market aberrations brought on by regulations. They're the invisible hand of capitalism itself: reaching out for quick gains while avoiding as much downside risk as possible." Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis. Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point. So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways. You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information. Yeah, every now and then somebody does this one thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place. This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a goal that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough. I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind. If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car. If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.

fl3tch 14y ago

If you want to make a difference, quit trying to cash out as a 25 year old millionaire. Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end. But the people who succeed change the world. Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.

msutherl 14y ago
Is this the only way to make a big difference? I would love to see something like a guide to making a difference in the world. What are the major archetypes of such people? For instance, what of the managers who brought together the teams of PhD's to do the work – are they not just as important as the Nobel winners? And how does one become such a manager?
jjsz 14y ago
Really? I think you shouldn't come up in here telling people that cashing out at 25 doesn't make a 'real' difference. There are people who prefer life experience, over work and research experience. There are people who rather invest in other people taking that risk, than taking the risk themselves. Everybody's different. The millionaires are the ones paying for your research work. So when someone like you spends 30 years chasing their dreams after acquiring a PhD and fail-- they have more-or-less acquired a different way of thinking about things. Right? They gain a different self, a different sense of awareness. They gain a specialization of some niche topic. I get it. Researchers change the world theoretically. The thing is doing research and influencing others to think differently is the same thing as influencing people with products or services. They all have the same goal, to change the way people think about a topic or way of doing things. It isn't tied down to one route. Because interestingly, MOST millionaire's become philanthropists. And they are not interested in retiring either. And like how the top comment said, it's not one big disruption that changes things, it's the succession of little bits of implementations or modrnizations of products, services, and ideals. All in harmony. One branch isn't worth worshiping more than the other branch. I know you were targeting the people who retire and enjoy life, without investing or donating back but there's a world out there to see and not everybody gets bored with it at the same rate as you do. Edit: Some people like to manage and become overseers, they get the thrill of life from that, you can't tell them they're doing it wrong, that they should quit and enjoy life. That will bring anarchy and chaos. The same thing with a whole bunch of people sitting in a laboratory. I remember reading a book that went over this topic, about people being programmed to work in the laboratory. There were different levels, and Level B's worked in the lab. The book isn't coming back to me..It was where one level were giving audios while they sleep to acknowledge their inferiority. What a book, if I find out what it was I have to re-read it.

SqMafia 14y ago

Can people stop taking one data point and using that to extrapolate to a large group? This is pretty bad journalism. Sure, OK story telling but it's not exactly the truth.

a_p 14y ago

David Wheeler has an interesting list of what he considers to be important software innovations. [1] Most of the innovations listed occurred in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. An interesting quote from an article[2] about an interview with Linus Torvalds in LWN.net: "A member of the audience asked Linus to describe his single most memorable moment from the last 20 years. Linus responded that he didn't really have one; the kernel is the result of lots of small ideas contributed by lots of people over a long time. There has been no big "ah ha!" moment. He went on to describe a pet peeve of his with regard to the technology industry: there is a great deal of talk about "innovation" and "vision." People want to hear about the one big idea that changes the world, but that's not how the world works. It's not about visionary ideas; it's about lots of good ideas which do not seem world-changing at the time, but which turn out to be great after lots of sweat and work have been applied." [1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/445687/ https://lwn.net/Articles/445687/

ahoyhere 14y ago
Along those lines, the BBC documentary "The Story of Science" shows over its episodes that this is true. It's really a fantastically intellectual series and well worth acquiring and watching.

buss 14y ago

> Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics Incidentally, if you'd like to actually turn terabytes of genomic data into actionable medical information, Counsyl is hiring software developers https://jobs.counsyl.com https://jobs.counsyl.com

ohwp 14y ago

Maybe the problem is that innovation and invention are mixed up all the time. The CD was a great invention while Apple is an innovative company. I'm not sure this is correct but I think that innovations remove risks while inventions are always risky or don't bother to think about risks. Edit: to make myself more clear: I think that innovations are about renewal and inventions are about new. Some examples (in my eyes): Apple is innovative, IBM is inventive.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Silicon Valley used to be a place with cheap land where people went because the cost of living was low, and they could tinker with cool ideas whereas, in the expensive East Coast cities, they'd have to work themselves to death just to tread water. California was this place where you could come and do cool stuff and build on land the East Coast elite didn't want. It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's why urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city per se) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness. Enter VC, which connects people with the resources (funding) to try out their ideas and, better yet, enough resources that they have a "rocket fuel" advantage over any competitors. Over time, the VCs and "tech press" became king-makers. Then, the well-connected became a new, informal, executive suite who care more about protecting each other than genuine competition. Hence, VC-istan. It's the first postmodern corporation, cleverly designed to look like a free market. Reputable investors are the executive suite. People with the authority to write welfare-checks-I-mean-acqhires at big companies are The Compensation Board because they decide on bonuses. "Tech press" are another part of the HR department that writes performance reviews. So-called startup "CEOs" are semi-independent PMs. Software engineers are peons who work long hours because they haven't figured out yet that they work at a big company and aren't actually going to getting investor contact and made founders in 7.35 months-- that was a degenerate empty promise. VC-istan has clever marketing. It doesn't look like a stodgy corporate behemoth, but it is. That is why it has ceased to innovate.

eli_gottlieb 14y ago
It's no longer cheap to live there. Tinkering with new ideas on some modest amount of savings and "odd jobs" or consulting is no longer possible. Expensive real estate leads to calcification and risk-aversion and cultural death. It's why urban ecosystems (including VC-istan, which is not a city per se) turn into hellholes shortly after their peak of greatness. Many of the world's top cities are expensive as all hell, but in the American case at least it's largely because you're simply not allowed to build denser dwellings. Silicon Valley is stuck with huge towns full of two-story single-family housing in an area where demand can easily support multifamily apartment buildings :-/.

redwood 14y ago

This whole discussion boils down to whether the 'big' ideas can be considered to come from software or not. If they only come from hardware, e.g. infrastructure/energy/poverty-changing, then sure they take longer to create, and have higher risk. But we are making progress on them. On the software side there is of course big innovation, admittedly hard to quantify. The internet has changed the human experience in more profound ways than many physical innovations ever did.

csomar 14y ago

There is a clear hostility toward digital products. If a physical product that shows up a screen in the air (holoscreen) to Skype another person, all people would suddenly scream: OH, that's innovation. Yet Skyping through an LCD screen gives the same result. If BMW or Tesla design a futuristic looking key for a car, we call that innovation and cool. But a nice designed interface, is just another interface. If some scientists burn a whole lot of money* to analyze DNA data, we call that innovation and science. However, when app ABC tries to connect people and do some social work, we call that another social app and a Facebook clone. Please stop the hostility. Creating a new API library or writing code that does something new is indeed "Innovation". It's certainly not getting to the moon, but it's still a very little bit of innovation. The new Internet enabled me, from a small third-world country to create a sizable income (at least comparing to my country per capita), learn a "LOT" and build a viable business. Internet put aside, I have no chance of making even $1000/year in my country. That, and the fact that I started from exactly nothing (family computer) is for me this decade "miracle". The innovation in payments, digital products, advertising... have improved access to wealth and mobility. I guess, the problem of the majority of people is access to wealth. There is too much wealth around (look at the majority of jobs, they are about moving wealth and not creating it e.g. doctors, lawyers, gov., traders, brokers, middle men...). Access to wealth will improve the life of the average person more than accessing the moon. The Internet offers an unmatched opportunity to access wealth. Please innovate in HTML, JavaScript and Servers. * I'm not nitpicking on data scientists or any body, just to give an example.

DaniFong 14y ago

For what it's worth, in my experience the people talking about big innovation, actually ARE extremely supportive of genuine, plausible efforts at producing planetary scale improvements. In our case, we're trying to solve the economical energy storage problem (lightsail.com) These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections. Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include: Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates --- By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them. So I think people are at least trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try! I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty. If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas. There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on. People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail. There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days. --- I would welcome any hard data to the contrary.

jenkinsj 14y ago

I very similar view on advertising was expressed by David Copeland not to long ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832538 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2832538

pg 14y ago

These articles are easy to write (and upvote) but such conclusions are pretty meaningless till you have a definition of what counts as innovation. That's a very interesting question, and yet just about everyone who talks about this topic ducks it and goes instead for the easy score. Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things that fly through the air are innovative, and invisible software isn't) is mistaken. But what would a good measure be?

jusben1369 14y ago
It's true. But also somewhat reminiscent of the "What is a startup?" discussion a few months back which was inconclusive. It seems "everyone knows what it is but no one can explain it" But to take a stab at it I'd say the level of innovation is directly tied to the amount of economic improvement and/or life improvement that results. Internet = huge change in economic efficiencies and life improvement. ("Life improvement" would have to be related to time free'ed up to spend on other goals) Mobile the same.
jamesaguilar 14y ago
I would say that delta on how people live their daily lives (maybe in time-affected or some other similar metric) is probably close.
danielpal 14y ago
I used to view innovation as: making it possible to do something that wasn't possible before (going from 0 to 1). But under that definition alone, SpaceX would not be very innovative. It's just sometimes when you go from 1 to N but the N is so large (like SpaceX case) it's probably a different kind of innovation. And by making the N that large, it's starts to look a lot like 0-1 and new opportunities arise, like the chance of getting to Mars (which is definitely 0-1)
- akiselev 14y ago
  There are certain fields where everything is pretty much 0 to 1. Designing a nuclear reactor or an orbital rocket is an incredible feat of engineering, even if you have half a century or more of work to fall back on.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jacoblyles 14y ago

If you are considering a new startup idea and you think "that sounds easy, I can build it in a month", then you are most likely entering a crowded market where your startup will not add much marginal value to the world. This is most consumer startups. If instead, your idea makes you say "That sounds hard. I'm going to have to overcome technical challenges/ accumulate domain expertise/ leap regulatory hurdles" then you are most likely breaking new ground, adding significant value to society, and creating something hard to copy. As much as I am happy for the success of the snapchats of the world (and the army of snapchat clones), I don't think the world would miss them very much if they were gone.

ghaff 14y ago

I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to also check out the cover story from Technology Review a few months back: "Why we can't solve big problems." http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/ http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-... It touches on issues with the VC investment model but brings in a lot more as well.

RougeFemme 14y ago

I think another relatively recent development - last 20 years or so - hindering innovation is the proliferation of "Wall street analysts" and their quarterly projections which focus comapnies on the very short-term. . .at least publicly-traded companies. They can do well, but if they don't do as well as "the analysts" projected then they are deemed failures who must do some soul-searching, cost-cutting, etc.

snambi 14y ago

Completely agree with this. Very very rarely any real innovation happens. Most of the time financial success is viewed as innovation. It may innovation in terms of business. But hard to say they are innovation on a scale that is more universal.

graycat 14y ago

The article points to some problems, and there are some. But the article also has some problems. Here is an easier explanation: First, the entrepreneurs are not bringing the venture partners enough projects with good, powerful, valuable innovation. Second, the venture partners do not want to evaluate innovation and, instead, want to evaluate 'traction'. They want to see traction significant and growing rapidly. This concentration on traction may come mostly from demands of the limited partners. A failing of the article is that it didn't explain the crucial role of traction. Third, as in the article, there are some cliches about 'innovation': It's very expensive in time and money, very risky, done for its own sake just for the fun of seeing amazing things, is from dedication to change the world and not for ROI, is impossible to evaluate, is largely separated from business and reality, etc. To save space here, I omit 1-1 pairings of each of these cliches with parts of the article. Exercise: Do the pairings. Hint: They all exist. So, it is easy for the venture partners to be afraid of innovation, to fear that it is an interest and direction in conflict with ROI and not an advantage. With this fear, traction and innovation are worth at most just the traction alone and otherwise maybe significantly less. Fourth, information technology (IT) entrepreneurship, from both sides of the table, has a problem with 'patterns': There aren't useful ones easy to see just from the past 40 years. Why? The examples of big successes are, say, Square, PInterest, InstaGram, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, HotMail, Cisco, Oracle, Seagate, HP, Dell, ..., Microsoft, Intel. So, get such a big win maybe less than once a year; in 10 years get only a few big wins; then in the next 10 years technology has changed so much that the empirical patterns from the past 10 years don't work very well. Fifth, the cliches in the article about technology are too pessimistic. E.g., if innovation in technology is so risky and unpredictable, then how come it has done so much in the last 40 years? I mean, we're talking a 3.0 GHz 8 core processor for less than $200, main memory for $10/GB, a 3 TB hard disk for $135, 1 GbE on each motherboard, 100 GbE on one wavelength on a fiber with dozens of wavelengths, etc. No, there are some reliable 'patterns' as illustrated by the technology advances. The pattern? Pick a pair of a problem and a solution. The problem should be such that a good or much better solution will get eager users/customers (want no doubts about 'product/market fit'). For the crucial solution, innovate, e.g., do some research in applied mathematics, applied science, or engineering. How to do such research? There is education for that, long heavily funded mostly for US national security. The education is available at the top two dozen or so US research universities and is called a Ph.D. For more on this 'pattern', look at the progress in IT of the last 40 years, say, from when Intel got going, along with what the US DoD has done starting early in WWII to the present. Risky? Not really: Mostly can eliminate nearly all the risk with just good technical work just on paper. And before that paper is written, one of the lessons usually learned in a good Ph.D. program is how to pick a suitable problem where 'suitable' means can get results that are "new, correct, and significant" with the meager time and other resources available to a Ph.D. student. For the needed innovation just want "new, correct, significant, powerful, and valuable" for the needed solution within the time and money available. Expensive? Not always. DoD and NASA projects tend to be expensive due to some heavy hardware, but not all innovation is expensive. E.g., RSA. But generally the crucial work should be done and on paper in good form before allocating a lot of resources. The solution? IT entrepreneurs need to do better innovation with nearly all the risk removed by work just on paper (or in PDF). The venture partners, if they want to invest, need to be willing to evaluate work on paper and invest at that 'stage'. But there is now a threat to the venture partners: Now the computing is so cheap that by the time a project has the traction that venture partners want to see, there is a good chance that the project is already nicely profitable. E.g., suppose an entrepreneur does some innovation to get a powerful, valuable solution to a big problem and brings up a Web site to deliver the solution on the Internet. Then look at the Meeker data at KPCB and average her CPM figures for mobile and desktop and get $2.125. Assume the Web site gets users enough to send 2 Web pages a second with 4 ads per page. Then in one month the revenue would be 2.125 * 4 * 2 * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 1000 = 44,064 dollars. If each Web page sends for 400,000 bits, the upload bandwidth needed is commonly available in US living rooms from a cable TV company. It is likely that a computer with less than $2000 in parts is sufficient as a server. And can consider using cloud servers. So, we're looking at a project with a $2000 chunk of hardware, an Internet connection, with phone and TV, for less than $200 a month, one or a few founders, and $44,064 a month in revenue. Now why should such a project, sending 2 Web pages a second and getting $44,064 a month in revenue. call a venture partner or return a venture partner's call? Yes, this scenario has not yet resulted in a lot of big wins, but the threat to venture capital and the opportunity to entrepreneurs is just sitting there. Likely one good example is the romantic matchmaking Web site in Canada, Plenty of Fish, long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just from Google, and $10 million a year in revenue. An established pattern? No. Obvious? Yes. Note that I am saying that the opportunity is to (1) get a Ph.D. in applied math, applied physical science, or engineering from a good research university, (2) pick a pair of an important problem and a good or much better solution where the solution can be generated from software running on servers and delivered to users/customers over the Internet, (3) for the solution do some innovation, that is, some research in applied math, applied physical science, or engineering, (4) write the software, plug together the server(5), bring up the Web site, go live, get publicity, users/customers, ads, revenue, and earnings, and grow. For the venture partners, they can (1) stay with their current ROI, significantly less good than an index fund, (2) look for more mobile, social, local, sharing apps for teenage girls to gossip and look for boyfriends, or (3) get serious about innovation and encouraging and evaluating it and then funding its exploitation. No, venture partners should not invest in research, but they likely will need to get quite serious once the research is solid on paper and, in particular, drop their scorn, contempt, ridicule, and phobia about research. Funding based just on paper? That's how nearly all large engineering projects, DoD projects, etc. get done. Net, for what is crucial about innovation, paper is fine.

tyang 14y ago

This article stirs the pot but is flawed. Low hanging fruit gone? Proof? And how is that relevant? If you want to innovate, do it. Figure it out. Stop blaming investors or the government. Blame yourself and fix yourself so you are doing the kind of innovation you want to, even it is part-time, initially. Go be a professor at Caltech, MIT, Stanford or Berkeley and work on the hardest problems in science and technology and innovate. Go work for Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Innovate yourself. Stop trying to "kill it" as you Lean-Startup your way to a billion dollar company. And stop whining. :)

stretchwithme 14y ago

Whenever fundamental innovation is successful and a huge platform is created, it is followed by the creation of companies that exploit that platform. That may take away from more fundamental innovation in the short term but creates more resources to pursue them in the long term. Its nothing to be concerned about.

shmerl 14y ago

To boost innovation US needs to abolish software patents and significantly rework the whole sick patent system.