I’m not sure about the premise of the article but I do concur that startups have been largely unable to develop new technology and commercialize it until relatively recently. During the 2000’s if you were doing a “hard” tech company, investors did not have the patience to invest in these companies and allow them to grow. I worked at several of these startups, many with big VC names you’d recognize and they killed these companies with their short term focus.

Later in that decade with the success of Facebook, investors turned away from these investments and were more interested in finding the next Facebook. Essentially the 2000’s were a kind of lost decade in fundamental technology development. Most of what was built during the decade was the benefactor of cheap computing enabled by 50 years and trillions of dollars in semiconductor investment. Now that we are hitting the edge of what’s possible, it’s time for big, long term, hard tech investment.

It’s only been more recently where people like Elon Musk and to a lesser extent Larry Page at Alphabet have led the way by being willing to take big bets on technology development. In the last several years, we are finally starting to see some venture capital follow where investors are taking a long view and betting on a few “moonshots.” In the last couple years there have been big investments in computing with companies like Cerebrus doing wafer scale computing, PsiQuantum and Rigetti in quantum computing, and various optical computing companies to name a few. Of course, there has also been considerable investment in the AV space as well and the AV space will need lower power, cheaper solutions that you won’t be able to simply buy off the shelf and slap together like almost all of the AV companies are doing today.