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Comment by jluan | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the point you make contradicts Steve Blank's at all; to me, Blank's thesis is that startups in the Valley no longer choose to pursue truly disruptive technological innovation because our ecosystem now almost exclusively rewards areas such as social media, where you have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are, to the detriment of "hard tech" such as biotech, robotics, and the semiconductors of old.

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Elon Musk made his fortune with Paypal, an internet company. Google made its fortune on the internet. There is nothing that prevents people from making the easier dollars first in something like Zynga and then going and putting their personal $10M to work on something of substance.

This. A lot of people forget that Elon Musk spent a large portion of his own money to fund new ventures from Paypal. Bill Gates is helping many disadvantaged people around the world with the money he earned from Microsoft. I'd also like to point out that a lot of these Internet companies contribute to charities, so the money isn't just a 100% flow up the hierarchy.

This doesn't hit the root of the problem. If we rely on the current SV enterprise model, we're basically just hoping that the billionaires that come out of this social media binge will be socially aware enough to invest in hard problems themselves, and in that sense, they become almost feudal lords.

This is a case where I think, just like Blanks states, the government's responsibility to counteract market forces for the common good plays a role. We should be tripling our research grant budgets for hard science. I feel like every week I'm hearing of an MIT PhD student making major breakthroughs in nanotube battery capacity or thorium reactor tech, but these aren't valuable investments for private VCs because the returns will not be quick and will not be as outrageous as a site that can go live tomorrow with the virality of the Ebola virus.

But that's just the way the cookie crumbles, ie, the market forces at work. I don't think it makes sense on a society level to be investing as much as we are in social ventures, and I hope we do find a way, public or private, to shift some of that investment back into solid tech. Wildcard prediction: biotech is the next big boom.

Taking money from everyone to fund science... could be argued, I suppose. Taking money from successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to fund government science would be merely stupid. In other words, what I object to about the parent comment is the notion that the U.S. government could possibly, possibly, be better-intentioned and wiser in practice, on average in real life, than the winners of the great startup contest.

Google is fundamentally different from Facebook because they solved a really hard problem really well and then found an excellent way of monetizing their solution. People still use Google today largely because it works better than the other options out there. Further, the other options are worse not because the others aren't trying hard enough or spending enough on search.

To me, Google falls squarely in the disruptive and hard category. I mean no disrespect to Zuckerburg, but there's a reason Google was founded by two Stanford PhD students and not a bunch of bored undergrads.

110% correct.

Funny, the more I learn about Facebook, the less I believe to this distinction. You've got to see how much people FB hired out of Goog to see that they've got some technical talents, and I can hardly imagine they are idling. Facebook may not be solving all the same problems than Goog, but they probably have an equivalent advanced DC management. See their work on devops, PHP compiler, and how they opened their server architecture. There is a part of truth, but I think Google PR has created itself a good image of "engineer wizards" which may be a bit overstated.

Facebook now have a lot of very difficult technical problems to solve and are doing a great job solving them. But what got them here wasn't a great algorithm, it was good execution on a fairly simple concept.

As I understand it, I think they're disagreeing like this:

Blank: The valley used to invest in hard problems that made the world a better place. Now that era is gone for good. Because social media makes so much money, no one will ever want to invest in hard problems in comparison.

Grellas: Yes we are no longer investing in hard problems. But that era isn't gone for good. Because the valley is such a good place for innovative startups, eventually, startups will start solving hard problems again.

There is a growing number of individuals doing hard tech. They just focus on working, and not on getting Likes.

The valley may be full of social media photo sharing people, but don't forget that the Valley still has strong roots on the homebrew side.

For every social app out there, there are ten hackers pushing code on the local HackerSpace.

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