I think part of the problem is that the people who get into an industry to make the world a better place understand that they need to maintain long-term control of their company to achieve that goal, and see that traditional VC funding is somewhat antithetical to that objective. There's no big payout for a VC that takes a minority stake in a company that may never go public and whose goals are probably to provide low-cost services to poor people in developing countries.

If you're bright enough to change the world, you're probably wise enough to anticipate the collision of these two worlds.

Look at Chamath palihapitiya‘s description of social capital. This is what he states he’s attempting to address.

The counter argument is addressed in a debate between Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel where Hoffman’s pov is that change occurs incrementally and what may not be considered revolutionary today (twitter, etc...) would be considered revolutionary 100 or so years ago.

The problem is that only four companies could bring the technological improvements you talk about to market. They are the only ones because they have achieved monopoly status and should be broken up.

Under the current regime, what is SoftBank to do? Buy four stocks and call it a day? Or pretend to find unicorns that aren’t even tech companies?

This is bar none the saddest comment I have read on HN in recent memory. Do that many of us feel that helpless and useless? Almost every tech we use was started by a single talented and/or dedicated person with the support of a small group of similar people.

This is that small group of similar people, and you may be that person.

We exist. Change is real. Do something.

Its not that easy

We are a small startup and we were outpacing 2 of the 4 giants

They resorted to outright illegal stuff

manipulation of search engine results not delivering our emails when it was to their email service hacking attacks click fraud on our ads

*

The REAL problem is not that they have monopoly status and cannot be outpaced

The real problem is that they abuse their monopoly position, do illegal things, and get away with it

Now we are building

both a platform

and

our own search engine

Consider the absurdity of that

Instead of just building a better product (which we had) and being able to win and/or compete based on that

We have to literally build our own entire ecosystem

How many startups can do that?

Should every tech company that happens to be competing against the big 4 monopolies be expected to do that

Not really. Many key technologies are created by startups.

For example, startups are doing a lot in robotics and synthetic biology.

the vision fund is like $100 billion right? you don't think that's enough resources to bring about some big change? why are only 4 tech companies capable?

Google, Apple, MS, Amazon?

Add Facebook too. But basically hardware is really difficult and we plucked all the easy fruits long way back. A small misstep will kill you (eg: Intel and 10nm).

> But basically hardware is really difficult and we plucked all the easy fruits long way back.

Remember the old saw "You only use 10% of your brain."? Yeah, that's wrong, but what is almost completely true is "You only use 1% of your transistors."

We have a zillion free transistors and they spend all their time idle--even on tiny, battery powered electronics. We haven't even scratched the surface of what to do with all these transistors.

I have two entire Linux machines that communicate in such a way merely to open a door. And I only feel slightly guilty about being that wasteful. :)

Everybody programs embedded hardware with dongles with underpowered microcontrollers. Why? Put an entire Linux computer behind it (RPi or Beaglebone)--now what can you do?

The current failure of tech is lack of imagination. Or, perhaps more charitably, lack of competent implementors (hardware and software) with imagination.

Transistors are free--now let's build something out of them.