Sorry, Sam, SV doesn't see much in the
way of serious, powerful, valuable,
important innovation. Or, with some
high irony, the real builder of SV,
the US DoD and aerospace, is the real,
all-time, unchallenged, unique world-class
example of innovation and in comparison
the present SV is a bad joke.

Sam, the rest of innovation is not all
about atoms, SnapChat, PInterest,
AirBnb, Uber, iPhone, Android,
or Tesla.

For Tesla, I predict that
in a few years Tesla will have gone
the way of just another fad, this one
only for rich people. Why? The
battery technology sucks. Thus, for
the car, the range
is too short and the charging time
too long, especially when charging at
home. And the battery durability sucks.

One of the main problems with SV innovation
is one of the first
steps in innovation -- objective, expert,
peer review of the
crucial, core technology. Such reviews
are standard and easy to get from
the Ph.D. committees of the world's
best research universities, the
best journals of original research, and
the NSF, NIH, and DARPA but not from
SV, YC, etc. To SV and YC, technology
is just routine software, often in, say,
C++ or Python. Might regard the application
of the technology as new as a business
but not the
technology itself.

Net, for innovation
and technology, SV and YC don't
get even half way to first base.

Hint, hint, hint: Information technology
is about, right, information, and basically
that's not about C++, Python, Tesla,
or atoms and instead: And the candidates
are, low gluten diets, Yoga meditation,
low carb diets, following 10 top psychics,
feedback from getting out of the building,
a liberal arts education with a lot of
attention to the great books, video games,
funding the advantages had only by
college dropouts, funding teams that
arrive to work on skateboards,
and powerful, valuable, high quality,
original research in
pure/applied mathematics. And the
winner is (drum roll, please).
Oops, sorry, my iWatch just went dead
and I lost the answer.
Sorry 'bout that.

Let me know when SV is ready to read a
math paper. I have one with a small
typo and will place a bet with you here on HN,
$1, that in the next 30 days no one
at a SV VC firm or YC will be able to find the
typo.

Then we can move on to noticing some leading
examples of L^2, that L^2 is complete, and
how to use that as part of the crucial, core foundation
to building a company worth, say, ballpark,
$740 billion. Hint: Divide that in half
and think a little.

From all my time in pure/applied math in research
universities, working on challenging
US DoD problems, and in one CS lab,
I was around
nearly all quite bright people. Then I
got to know about the SV information technology
world and its version of innovation and
did a big upchuck and, then, a big laugh.

SV innovation? Smoking funny stuff in
an echo chamber. Just where does SV get
that really strong funny stuff it smokes?

But, but, but, SV IT VC is making money for
its LPs, right? Likely not very much. Or
see

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/02/venture-capital-returns.htm

But, Sam, surely you don't believe that there's
any significant interest in innovation in
SV IT, right? I mean,
about innovation in SV, you were
just being facetious, just joking, right?
Sam, please tell me you were just joking.
If you weren't just going for laughs, then
SV IT is worse off than I feared.