Why Silicon Valley innovation has stalled

You say that like you aren't aware it's a true statement? You have terrible odds of becoming rich being a cancer researcher.

It's a hard problem to solve, though. The obvious answer of "route more money to cancer researchers" produces the obvious social attack of "more marginal people being or simply pretending to be cancer researchers", for instance. It's easy to get "more money" -> "more researchers", it's much harder to get "more money" -> "more research". (I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it's a lot harder than it looks.)

Fundamental innovation in tech is in hardware and software standards, neither of these things is suffering. The evolution of web standards is moving faster than it ever has. Hardware is making steady progress. Cloud computing is making big strides. Things are moving just as fast as ever, it's just obscured by the mass market noise that is obscuring the big picture.

Now obviously a lot of this stuff is incremental, but guess what: computers and networks aren't new anymore. The level of innovation from 1980-2000 was special because it introduced the power of general computing to the majority of the population. It's not a matter of simply working on harder problems to replicate that. It's one of a few evolutionary sea changes like mass production/automation, railroads, wired communications, or space flight. Nothing short of the singularity is going to appear that amazing, especially with the compounding effect of nostalgia.

Real ground-breaking tech comes from deep work & deep knowledge. It also comes from trying out ideas and watching the "99 lightbulbs that don't work". It turns out failing costs money, and groundbreaking work is hard to fund. In general, that is sort of the idea behind research labs not producing monetizing products: all they do is work up ideas. Maybe the ideas are usable, but statistically, most of those ideas aren't going to make money. Think very hard about that. As an investor or a founder, you have to be prepared to lose your money on some faffy idea that might be so far beyond the current worldstate that no one would buy it. The interested reader is advised to examine Common Lisp company history in the '80s for a classic case study. Or, alternatively, the Connection Machine.

Real innovation/groundbreaking ideas are exotic (a priori, this is what makes them the real deal). So there must be some sort of ability on the part of the company to transform the society into being ready for this idea.

Put another way, research is even more black swan than startups.

More importantly, there is a positive feedback cycle between what the author would consider "true innovation" and "trivial apps" -- before we can make a very large leap in terms of true innovation, we need some societal comfort with the paradigm. Those apps (like Twitter, the one Peter Thiel derided) serve a very important role: they move the bar culturally. These apps help acclimate people to the idea of technology (for example, owning and keeping a smartphone close to you) and make sure that society is ready for whatever next innovation happens. Without the societal leg of the cycle the "true innovation" will be stymied.

A lot of them feel that getting a PhD would make them overqualified to work in the industry.

The market has spoken, and it's rewarding people with little to no vision. It makes it OK to water down grand visions.

Fix the culture to stop focusing so much on being the top dog. This is a very difficult task.

And yet Elon Musk had no experience in the field prior to founding SpaceX.

He even went to Russia to try to buy a refurbished ICBM before going down the path of hiring aerospace engineers and building rockets in-house.

Excellent documentary on Musk: http://vimeo.com/38542529

Likewise, most businesses are not strictly innovative in a scientific/technological sense, merely in having a clever synthesis of preexisting tech that does something people will pay for.

There are a lot of innovative tech / engineering shops being created and or growing each year, but they're a bare fraction of the total number of businesses being created. (And all businesses have a web site these days, so clearly that's not tech ,,:-p )

The kicker is we're kinda already in an amazing future. We actually understand pretty well how much / little we truly know in most endeavors. Sadly, human psychology does get bored and demand ever more exotic novelty.

Being innovative in sci-tech and having a self sustaining business With RECURRENT are not often happily wedded, and every successful fusion should be cause for celebration.

Likewise its actually really hard to evaluate what IS innovative if you're not a domain expert. Etc etc etc

Usual caveat, I'm trying to fix numerical computing at wellposed, so I'm a bit overthinking about innovation always.

However, there are also many "serious" startups. Tesla, transforming the primary mode of transport for most Americans. SpaceX, reinvigorating space exploration. Palantir, integrating the world's data to save lives. There have, and always will be, these startups doing serious world-changing innovation.

I picture Silicon Valley as a funding pyramid. The best companies are at the top, and always get funding. Then, at the bottom of the pyramid are the daily deals startups. In a less hot funding environment, these companies wouldn't get funded. But in the current climate, a ton of companies at the bottom of the pyramid are getting funding. Since there are way more of these bogus startups than serious ones in the current climate, we just hear more stories about them.

The other thing about innovation in software is the need to distinguish between application development as distinct from computer science. Writing an application is very different from writing an algorithm! Much of the "boring innovation" happening right now is about application development, not computer science. Once we accept this we can start making clearer calls about what kind of innovation we think is stagnating.

In other words, it's not that resources that could have gone to "serious" projects are being allocated instead to easy projects. The author even says as much, different people are doing those jobs.

To stick with Thiel's hyperbole, I think we don't have flying cars because we still haven't fixed the issues with the road bound ones. Its great to have grand aims at revolutionizing the world, but lets not forget the big impact something as small as 140 characters can have. There are third world countries where entire economies have grown out of the ability to text message. Only a few years ago we saw entire swaths of the Middle East get big quality of life improvements thanks to wall posts and tweets.

I do believe that people are now used to a constant supply of groundbreaking news from SV. So, even though we are working at a pretty good rate, theit POV will be skewed from that need to always have their mind blown by some awesome app. A lot of innovation happens under the hood and they never notice. Too bad, though.

So I though, I might as well help a company that does just that, even if I'm not going to be the one designing the actual rockets.

I agree, and that's a full-time job that has to be self-directed. Excellence is a nonlinear phenomenon. A person who excels in 10 hours of his time and subordinates in 30 isn't 25% as someone who gets to be full-time excellent, but possibly 1%.

I spent 6 months at Google, a company that has some awe-inspiring R&D "centers of excellence" but is essentially just a bank if you don't get to work in one. Now, I'm sick of ragging on Google because I think I've overdone that schtick. On the other hand, with the incredible wealth of talent it has got, it can do a lot better. It's the best a closed-allocation company can be, and it has amazing people. But my experience there is instructive on the mediocrity that closed allocation command-and-control creates. If you don't have worker autonomy, you won't get creativity or excellence or innovation.

Google remains awesome because the ~25% who get to be Real Googlers (they can, like Yegge, quit their projects and join better ones, because teams compete for them) have enough autonomy to do really good work and keep pulling the company, but if you're not a Real Googler, you're going to be working on 4th-Quadrant crap. (For the definition of "4th-Quadrant", go here: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/01/01/fourth-quadra... .)

After that, I worked in a reputable (but diseased) NYC startup-- a VC darling-- with serious ethical problems at managerial levels (multiple people hired into the same leadership role; dishonesty about product direction used to keep people motivated). To my chagrin, the culture there was traditional MBA-style corporate bullshit: closed allocation, supernumerary people with fancy titles who didn't do much, extremely vicious politics (I resigned when asked to sign affadavits disparaging engineering old hands with too much equity).

The Valves and Githubs excepted, these "hip" tech startups are not culturally innovative, and it's the prevalence of the old-style corporate culture that makes them all devolve into grey-goo mediocrity.

Subordination is a genocidal killer of innovation, and the cultures of these "hip" tech startups are often not much different from large corporations in culture, creativity, innovation, or ethics. For every Valve, there are 100 companies that claim to be "startups" but are just as hierarchical and command-oriented. The hierarchy isn't as deep with only 100 people, but it's every bit as dysfunctional.

If we want innovation out of these startups, we have to focus on culture. We have to stop funding culturally retarded people with MBAs just because they're "credible" and, instead, look for people who can lead very smart people (an extremely rare skill).

Here is how innovation seems unfolding itself lately (Both in Silicon valley and outside of it):

Early stages of 3D printing, cars that drive themselves, drones that are cheap and interesting, gestures which lend themselves to web, voice processing and response at higher level, interesting touch surfaces where the buttons grow out of the screen depending on software interface, banking and virtual currency to kick ass of the arcane and so on ...

Here is (probably) the problem of tech blogs apparently. You guys have gone too close to investor community, or have started believing in the hype machine too much. Open your eyes and report on start-ups outside of 'likes' and 'tweets' and 'pluses' (Not that those are not news).

Open your eyes, probably.