I couldn't agree more with your comments: the innovations sama mentions are just shiny copies of what existed ten years ago, or maybe more - with a few exceptio

I couldn't agree more with your comments: the innovations sama mentions are just shiny copies of what existed ten years ago, or maybe more - with a few exceptions. This article is pretty depressing, since what he is saying is in essence "we created lots of innovation in the last ten years, and now we are going to change the world even more, because we are investing in energy and biotech". Now the innovation, as you say, if pretty artificial, and the two companies that are worth the more in YC portfolio are one that is semi illegally disrupting hotels (there are reasons why it's forbidden to transform your flat into an hotel room) and another one that built a wrapper around rsync. I'm from Europe, and the view I have from the SV is more a bunch of hipster programmers with macbooks building social networks to share cat pictures, than a center of technical innovation, and sadly, this post is not making me change my mind. I do hope to be proven wrong.