airbnb, asana, box, facebook, github, meteor, picloud, pinterest, skype, stripe, twitter, uber, yourmechanic, discourse, fundersclub, hoteltonight, mint, onekingslane, simple, square, taskrabbit, coursera, groupon, nest, spotify,
None of the companies in this list are, IMO, in the first class. Self-driving cars, insulin injections, freedom from oil, eradication of common diseases, the internet, semiconductors, the smartphone, etc, IMO all fall under this category.
The second class is where I see AirBnb, Facebook, Square, and the such. They've turned their respective industries upside down with something genuinely different and new (as opposed to simply executing better at lower cost).
IMO the majority of your list belongs in the third class - they're great products, but ultimately they are incremental improvements in their field and have not shown themselves to be disruptive. How has Pinterest changed the world? Or Groupon?
Funny anecdote about Groupon - I've talked to some small business owners way back when Groupon was at the tip of everyone's tongues, and it was never perceived as a disruptive force. Business owners considered them an evolution of coupon books, and treated it as a new, alternative marketing channel - it was never truly disruptive.
The whole point of the original post is that we're funding an ocean of "class 3" companies, a small handful of "class 2" ones, and basically none in class 1.
I'm sorry, this just completely blows my mind. I'd understand if you called git innovation (though the real innovation is distributed version control, and it existed before git, git is just a very good implementation), but calling github "innovation" seriously lowers the bar for that concept.
I mean, I love github, but come on, they aren't even the first ones to come up with the idea. SourceForge existed years before them.
Yes, they are kinda the same idea, but GitHub realized that the social element was key, and managed to create a community around open source the way that sourceforge never did (and, I would argue, didn't even know to do).
I used to feel very strongly about this issue of aiming for truly big stuff, and I agree that increased government involvement (and increased trust of government) is necessary, but I think that doing something really big is just... hard, and very few people can do that. Even large government projects require those rare visionaries. But SV and the startup ecosystem have put the power to make a small change in the hands of many people, and that's quite an achievement. Now we only have to come up with a way to find the few out of those that are truly capable of doing the big things, and help them along.
Twitter is a more accessible version of RSS feed allowing way easier access to subjects of interest for non-tech-savvy people.