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I wish we'd get back to science-tech instead of social-tech. Science requires a longer investment period (decades instead of a couple of years), but the paybacks are tremendous, particularly to society as a whole. I really like what Google is doing — essentially funding research that may not pan out, but that has the potential to be revolutionary if it succeeds (e.g. quantum computing).

This reminds me of a blog post (that I can't seem to find now) where he complains we've gotten so far away fro solving the hard problems that nobody is really doing it because it's too lucrative to make stupid apps that distract people. I have to agree with him and you. Facebook was a nice diversion but there are honest-to-God problems in this world that I think our industry could make a dent in. We need to get back to solving the hard problems.

Are you possibly thinking of this BusinessWeek article [1] about Jeff Hammerbacher and his famous quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads"

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/this-tech-...

You might also find this other article interesting, posted to HN today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12064083

Neither of those. But thanks anyway!

I seem to recall the blog post being by a guy who moved to Tupelo or some place like that. This was about 5-6 years ago.

> Silicon Valley hasn't released a blockbuster app, website or company in a while.

Uber? Was only founded 7 years ago, and took a few years before it really started to blow up.

I've found that there is a certain mindset that only considers the last 18-24 months as "recent" in the tech space. It's probably a similar mindset to that which makes you feel that only the latest and greatest frameworks are worth learning, for example.

Right, but 24 months isn't enough time for a brand new startup to become a 'blockbuster'. None of the current big tech cos like Google, Amazon, Facebook, were a 'blockbuster' within 24 months of being founded. If you want to see that kind of startup success, you HAVE to look more than a couple years back. Startups can grow very quickly, but not THAT quickly.

True. I think a better metric is the last 18-24 months of breakouts, rather than foundings.

Uber? Meh. All they've actually done is start to displace an incumbent rent-seeker by exploiting loopholes to charge a lower rent. It's great for the customer, but if that's you're idea of a revolutionary product...

Whether you personally like them is irrelevant. It's an extremely popular service, and the company has a very high valuation.

Snapchat hasn't changed anything. It's just a currently popular messaging app.

Snapchat obliterated Facebook's news feed with the younger generations under 25. Status updates are now Snapchat stories, and news feed items on Facebook are more like life milestones. So I think it changes the way younger demographics use social media. It definitely encourages a lot more trivial sharing of activities throughout the day with others.

All inside baseball. Nothing would happen if Snapchat disappeared overnight. People would send each other selfies by some other medium.

It's not that Snapchat is critical infrastructure. It's that they've captured the attention of a generation and are going to potentially build things in the future that could define how people interact with technology. I'm not saying that they will, it's too early to tell because they're just getting started. We'll see. But it's much too soon to dismiss it as just a chat app as well.

So they have a platform that's going to shape the next generations social interactions for the worse [1], and can only barely monetize (and if they can monetize profitably, its for an audience with the least amount of purchasing power in several generations)?

Pyrrhic victory.

[1] http://nypost.com/2016/07/04/im-a-millennial-and-my-generati...

Are you kidding? Advertisers trip over themselves for the chance to advertise to consumerism-drenched, trend-driven teenagers and soon-to-be twenty-somethings.

I'm not kidding at all. Advertisers spend money all the time that is literally no different than burning money in a dumpster fire.

I would say Tesla is on its way to make an iPhone-like impact, along with other self driving car technologies. I would consider the Tesla's Autopilot to be a blockbuster feature.

Tesla is important but will never sell anywhere near like an iPhone. Best case, in 10-20 years it's the self-driving fleet of choice and huge chunks of people ditch their cars for on-demand transportation. But even then in rural ares I'll wager there will still be many more people with iPhones than will be using Teslas.

Though I could be wrong.

"Tesla is important but will never sell anywhere near like an iPhone."

Well, you could say that about almost any other consumer product. The iPhone is a success orders of magnitude larger than the standard, IMO.

> Tesla is important but will never sell anywhere near like an iPhone.

One of the best parts about victories that large is that the benefit decouples from the original product. You don't have to buy an iPhone anymore, you can buy that $4 android touchscreen phone that is dirt cheap but only exists because the iPhone blazed various technical and cultural trails that turned something new and magical into a boring commodity, to the benefit of mankind.

Just as the premium $500 iPad leads to the $50 amazon fire, so too does the $150k tesla lead to the equivalent $20k toyota in a few years. That's a huge deal.

And there is the supply chain argument.. A Drone is basically a flying smartphone. Every new hardware product uses the smartphone supply chain. Imagine the effects of electric car/battery supply chain, one obvious effect is that everything else is going to be electric from buses to boats. We can also see the effects of the battery tech on solar power. Once people can efficiently store the solar energy they produce themselves for days, and even sell it to their neighbors through blockchain.

I've never used Snapchat and I hadn't used Uber until a month ago when I found myself working away from home and without a car. I haven't seen any truly revolutionary technology since smartphones became mainstream. Most of the social media applications unfortunately seem geared to the lowest common denominator, I don't see people like Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin extensively making use of them. I have a very difficult time discussing meaningful topics when I am limited to 140 characters or can only share photos.

What's a recent blockbuster app that wasn't released by a Silicon Valley company?

Not to be pedantic but Snapchat is actually from LA and they're very proud of this fact. In the VC context, they did take money from (Silicon Valley) VCs, but their origins and workforce isn't from SV.

You're right about that, I forgot that they were LA based. Still, Olscore lumped them in with Silicon Valley companies so the question still stands.

One of the last consumer-facing, blockbuster level startups outside of SV (or California) that comes to mind was Groupon. But I don't consider them to be that great; kind of a fad that took off for a while and is now lingering. When I say blockbuster level startup I mean something that becomes a household name used by mostly consumers. Highly visible companies mostly. I lump LA/SV together because they're in the same state, and there seems to be a lot of inter-funding between the two areas. But I'm also from Chicago so maybe it's just me. Hah.

Being even more pedantic, SnapChat started in a class in Stanford. They moved to LA because that's where their early users were and where they started to go viral.

(Of course, being equally pedantic about other Silicon Valley companies - Facebook, Reddit, Dropbox, and YCombinator all "started" in Boston, and the critical events in both AirBnB & Twitter's history happened at SXSW in Austin.)

London, Berlin, and Nordics are very strong for European startups. A lot of stuff starting to happen in Asia too (e.g. Taipei, Seoul, Bangkok)

Not recent but Jira Confluence etc.

I'd argue that question, the way it's phrased, is very revealing the advance of tech and the things enabled by tech don't begin and end with smartphone apps. There's a pretty strong social/web/app mindset to the SV lens today and it causes a lot of people to undervalue and overlook what's happening elsewhere. For example, as other have mentioned, biotech/pharma is huge in places like Cambridge and is barely represented in SV.

I used the term "app" but I really meant company. But the important term in the question is "blockbuster". If people are undervaluing and overlooking what's happening elsewhere it's because those things aren't blockbusters. Biotech/pharma companies have been pretty disappointing in terms of blockbuster discoveries. Maybe CRISPR will change that.

Not recent, but these are some objectively popular examples:

- Angry Birds, 2009 (Espoo, Finland)

- Kik, 2010 (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)

- Spotify (US launch), 2011 (Stockholm, Sweden)

- Candy Crush Saga, 2012 (Stockholm, Sweden)

I wouldn't call 2009 recent and Spotify has been around for 8 years now. It seems odd to draw a distinction for its American debut.

Clash of Clans?

http://blog.eladgil.com/2016/07/end-of-cycle.html :)