Note: This post comes along the heels of Jeff Bezos’s futuristic gig on flying octocopters (kudos to Amazon), but is meant to not distract from what is going on in the broader technology landscape today.

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In a recent story in an NYtimes post, Nick Bilton covered the story of how Twist - the app that texts friends when you are running late - was founded:
"Mike Belshe and Bill Lee were continually running late for meetings and texting each other: “I’ll be there in 5 mins!” So they created Twist, a 10-person start-up in the city’s South of Market neighborhood. The company’s first product is a smartphone app that helps you tell someone you’re late by showing your location on a map. Investors liked the idea enough to give Twist $6 million in venture financing last year. “We thought there had to be something better than sending a text message,” Mr. Belshe said in a phone interview. “We were trying to tackle that problem of meeting up and making it easier.”
Sure enough, one could mistake Twist to be the next big thing, if one were to go by its campaign billboard poster sprawled in a typical Microsoft marketing-mantra style across San Francisco’s SOMA walls. I had to step back to take a better look at the tagline while I was making my way one afternoon from 2nd to 3rd st on Folsom. “Lateness is a problem we all suffer with...Twist is the solution to that problem”, it informed.
Ah, Groundbreaking stuff, I murmured to myself, as I ran - quite incidentally - late, I realized upon looking up my watch, from my coffee break back to my office. If only this wasn’t the nth hunky-dory SoLoMo app I’d come across in San Francisco that summer, that made you want to scratch your head besides shaking it. Not to mention half-baked SoLoMo ideas that could inundate the ear, being overheard in endless chatter across the table at many a cafe between SOMA and San Jose.
Before this post gets mistaken for what it is not - since we all suffer from short attention spans in this age of information overload - here’s a clarification : I don’t have a problem per se with redundant apps. Or with time consuming (read wasting) social media funk and all that jazz. Current Valley bigwigs - Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Zynga have created new disruptions and admittedly are in vogue( though so are all those apps that make us just a wee-bit more instantly gratified in a narcissism-induced shower of friend-fueled validation). But while social and appy has been in vogue for over half a decade, and the billion-dollar valued Instagram-lookalikes have made their hay in the day, you’d think the Valley might perhaps come around to churning something more new, something more - serious, no?  But it seems like this is the reigning zeitgeist that is going to define our times. Not only is it going to define our times, it gets only more appy and more social from here on with clones of social appy twists on how you can share the story of your life with the world in yet another way. Maybe with a mascara highlight and an ostentatious grin captured through tweakable video rolls to cater to your image-crafting sensibilities.

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Some have gone as far as picking on today’s holy grails of technological prowess - those epitomes of innovation. As Peter Thiel said of the iPhone:“I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the Apollo space program.” ... “Twitter has a lot of users, but it doesn’t employ that many Americans: “Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.” Facebook was, he said, “on balance positive,” because of the social disruptions it had created—it was radical enough to have been “outlawed in China.” That’s the most he will say for the celebrated era of social media.”
While one may disagree that Twitter or the iPhone are not breakthroughs , given their network effects, reach and functional efficiency (Thiel dismisses them a little too easily) -  nonetheless it seems that the economy of scale that has built itself around social media and the smartphone ecosystem can be sometimes uninspiring in its function. Sure, every once in a while we can spread great stories and revolutions in social populations across the globe at a speed that is unprecedented in history. But on the flip side, as a collateral it has resulted in way too many smaller, less compelling and even frivolous players who seem fixated on inventing newer ways to waste the time of the consumer. (In saying this I am not even counting the amount of cumulative productive man-time that is wasted on social media. Or for that matter its under-researched longer-term psychological impact to human lives - for instance, has Facebook made us more social or more disconnected in real life, its insufferable privacy issues etc).
The more I started to probe the idea, I realized that there’s more than just a handful of thinkers who feel similarly about the nature of mainstream innovation in Silicon Valley. I came across an author who posted on their tech entrepreneurial blog: “Everyone is doing something amazing and trying to change the world, but in reality much of the technology being built here is not changing the world at all, it’s short-sighted and designed for scalability, big exits and big profits. Groupon clone after Groupon clone, yawn… yet another social media dashboard, a cloud-based enterprise solution or, worse still, another photo sharing app; I’ve heard pitch after pitch of the same technology and keep wondering why all these highly intelligent, well educated youngsters, many of whom have been educated in the best universities in the world (Stanford, Yale and Harvard) are not putting their brains to good use by solving real-world problems. Instead they’re building technology to solve trivial issues – like apps that show where to spot your nearest tofu cupcake and share it with your friends.”

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When its been a while since building the kind of social apps that allow you to share a tofu cupcake with your friends became hep currency, with every other serious entrepreneur wanting to do more of the same, its time we called a spade a spade. And yet the phrase “change the world” is casually tossed around Silicon Valley coffee chats and boardroom meetings  as if by mere attribution it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To some extent, one may concede, the upper echelon of successful tech innovations today may actually be considered futuristic, or encouraging of seemingly futuristic lifestyles, especially when seen from the outside. George Packer describes this phenomena in his New Yorker piece: “He(Morin) described San Francisco as a place where people already live in the future. They can hang out with their friends (on Facebook presumably) even when they’re alone. They inhabit a “sharing economy”: they can book a weeklong stay in a cool apartment through Airbnb, which has disrupted the hotel industry, or hire a luxury car anywhere in the city through the mobile app Uber, which has disrupted the taxi industry. “San Francisco is a place where we can go downstairs and get in an Uber and go to dinner at a place that I got a restaurant reservation for halfway there,” Morin said. “And, if not, we could go to my place, and on the way there I could order takeout food from my favorite restaurant on Postmates, and a bike messenger will go and pick it up for me. We’ll watch it happen on the phone. These things are crazy ideas.”
But then in the end Packer sums it up with:
“It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”
On the other hand, it might be harsh to discredit smart young entrepreneurs for wanting to building a good product (no matter how light-minded its use) - for there is no doubt about the quality and seamlessness of these technologies or of the suaveness of these apps. And if they deliver said service while generating revenue for the investors who back them and the workers who build them, isn’t that what running a good business is all about? Is a good businessman really obliged to care if nobody is undertaking to solve the world’s energy or hunger problems, as long as his tofu cupcake app gets the highest number of returning pin-button happy customers? After all, even an Apple executive recently famously said “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.” And this was Apple.
And so, it might well be that Silicon Valley is not obliged to solve the world’s bigger and  badder problems. Perhaps then it is merely the extent of the Valley’s public branding exercise over the decades - the outreach of its innovations, the rhetoric surrounding success culminating through  the widely-held notions of the deeply altruistic promise of science and technology - that gives it the aura and an unsaid social(no pun intended) responsibility that comes with it.

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Last week while having lunch in a downtown Palo alto restaurant, I accidentally overheard a conversation at an adjacent table between two entrepreneurs who had flown in from Barcelona, and a venture capitalist. The founders were looking to relocate their company to the bay area and they were trying to sell their company’s vision. The company aimed to bring changes to the health-care market - which apparently from what I could gather from their discussion is currently a mess in not just the United States but in different ways in other parts of the world as well(That it is a mess in the US, I get reminded of every other day). Their pitch seemed to include a 2-year development and launch cycle - at which the VC balked at them. Thereafter he failed to conceal his absolute lack of interest in their plan. He said “Nobody these days is going to fund a startup which takes 2 years to go to market with its first beta product... especially not in a space with the kind of policy restrictions that your solution will have to counter. Today we have companies like Pinterest and Airbnb that can be churned out in a matter of months and scaled to reach stratospheric multi-million dollar valuations in no time.”
There is one prominent thing which sets Silicon Valley apart from technological hubs around the world. It is not access to talent - for talent and grit is pervasive and with a bit of digging and training, can be made accessible in Africa as in San Jose. What sets the stage apart for the Valley is essentially the ecosystem of funding and access to finance - from VCs to angel investors, there is no parallel to the kind of capital that a lot of value seeking investors have made accessible to put into pursuit-worthy ideas. If that may be, then perhaps one avenue to explore why Silicon Valley rewards so many fake problems today is to ask the question directly to venture capitalists why the entrepreneurs who want to take on real innovation aren’t getting funded. As a preface to the Founder’s fund, Bruce Gibney writes in a narrative that is hard to disagree with, let alone explain the crucial role of venture capital in driving serious innovation. Here is an excerpt of the historical perspective he offers of VC investments in the past:

“In the 1960s, venture closely associated with the emerging semiconductor industry (Intel, e.g., was one of the first – and is still one of the greatest – VC investments). In the 1970s, computer hardware and software companies received funding; the 1980s brought the first waves of biotech, mobility, and networking companies; and the 1990s added the Internet in its various guises. Although success now makes these investments seem blandly sensible, even obvious, the industries and companies backed by venture were actually extraordinarily ambitious for their eras. Although all seemed at least possible, there was no guarantee that any of these technologies could be developed successfully or turned into highly profitable businesses. When H-P developed the pocket calculator in 1967, even H-P itself had serious doubts about the product’s commercial viability and only intervention by the founders saved the calculator. Later, when the heads of major computing corporations (IBM, DEC) openly questioned whether any individual would ever want or need a computer – or even that computers themselves would be smaller than a VW – investment in companies like Microsoft and Apple in the mid-1970s seemed fairly bold. In 1976, when Genentech launched, the field of recombinant DNA technology was less than five years old and no established player expected that insulin or human growth hormone could be cloned or commercially manufactured, much less by a start-up. But VCs backed all these enterprises, in the hope of profiting from a wildly more advanced future. And in exchange for that hope of profit, VC took genuine risks on technological development.

In the late 1990s, venture portfolios began to reflect a different sort of future. Some firms still supported transformational technologies (e.g., search, mobility), but venture investing shifted away from funding transformational companies and toward companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems (e.g., having Kozmo.com messenger Kit-Kats to the office). This model worked for a brief period, thanks to an enormous stock market bubble. Indeed, it was even economically rational for VCs to fund these ultimately worthless companies because they produced extraordinary returns – in fact, the best returns in the industry’s history. And there have been subsequent bubbles – acquisition bubbles, the secondary market, etc. – which have continued to generate excellent returns for VCs lucky enough to tap into them. But these bubbles are narrower and the general market more demanding, so VCs who continue the practices of the late 1990s (a surprising number) tend to produce very weak returns. Along the way, VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead has become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances. “

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One could draw as a corollary that even the VC portfolio strategy today seems to be to invest in smaller chunks of low amounts of money in hundreds of startups rather than shell in a few million to a select few promising ones. Writing a $100,000 check for a 100 foursquare act-alikes seems to be the preferred modus operandi of the typical VC today, rather than loading up a round of 20 million for a nextgen cross-country bullet train. The volume of investing may have even gone up, but rather the value seems to have diminished. Additionally, costs of infrastructure for cloud-hosted and mobile applications have reduced tremendously thanks to IaaS and anybody with a simple idea can get down to mocking a minimal viable product that gains traction with users in little time to provide validation. Hence, the trend has now become that unless an entrepreneur in the consumer space has an MVP and users with traction, he will not be funded. Which throws out the window  a lot of complex projects requiring a seed funding in the millions to even envision a prototype. Hence they fail to compete for the VC’s attention.
Besides the amount of funding which appears to be a strategic change in investors, there is also the time to exit - with VCs preferring to fund companies that can have early exists , preferably in acquisitions rather than a company which will yield future potential cash flow or revenue but over a longer period of time. So if VCs want to fund entrepreneurs who have found a new way to help communicating a meeting schedule to your friends on a social network, and the app already has a million users, they are ready to put in half a million, hoping for a quick turnaround in a year or two where the company gets acquired for 10x by a giant. They would much rather have that formula knocked down and realized than fund an idea for new alternative energy development that is going to take a decade to build a support infrastructure around itself.
But then there was the Founders fund started by Peter Thiel and similarly disillusioned high-profile investors and industry veterens. It boasted the motto - “We wanted flying cars, instead they gave us 140 characters”, to convey the need for a kind of redemptive attempt at bringing back serious technology to the market.  If we are to go with the notion that a certain kind of technology that has peaked in its usefulness, it is important to identify the growth areas where bigger potential lies. I read through the fund's manifesto and the focus areas that they sought to invest in - these were precisely the areas where mainstream innovation felt left incomplete, but which held great potential to higher-impact breakthroughs. Of the 5 areas the fund focuses on, transportation, biotech and energy have coincided with being high on my own personal wish-list for a long time, for the kind of tech I would’ve liked to see come to life. Here is a summary of each of the fund’s focus areas:
Aerospace and Transportation - Over the past 30 years, there have been no radical changes in transportation . As someone who thinks often about how the time taken to travel between San Francisco and New Delhi hasn’t improved in my lifetime and looks like its not getting better anytime soon, this was an immediate winner in my mind. Think about how you would live differently, if you could move cost-effectively between two cities across the globe in a matter of 3 hours as opposed to 30.
Biotechnology - Genetic sequencing, which can be used to create new ways of cure, is currently highly expensive, slow and error prone. Also it is far too expensive and time consuming to realize if a new drug might work with animal or human trials, so the time to market for new drugs is extremely long. Life spans today are not getting as long as quickly they used to, and important new drugs(think cure for cancer) are not getting introduced quickly enough. There will be clear winners in this space if companies target these areas, and will create value for investors and society.
Advanced machines and software - While there has been exponential growth in computing (Moore’s law) and storage capacity reflected in the ever increasing performance of computer processors, advanced analytical software has not managed to keep pace. (Though I feel the advent of big-data albeit a more recent development, seems to address partly the question of not just collecting but analyzing and putting to use large volumes of available data.) But in particular the power of industrial robotics and artificial intelligence has not been harnessed to its potential in recent times. The ability to create replicable forms of human intelligence has enormous potential but remains poorly funded.
Energy - Conventional energy sources pose a variety of challenges in the longer run - from political to environmental to sustainability issues, hence the need to commercialize alternative energy is clearer than ever. Despite a lot of money having been poured into green and clean-tech, there are very few companies that are making a marked difference. The reasoning is that they need to not only innovate to create better products that compete with existing solutions, but that they need to come up with those that actually cost less than the alternative, in order to encourage switching over to them. Unfortunately there are a lot of impediments involving large scale infrastructure and policy issues which hinder the easy deployment of most alternatives. This has resulted in mostly incremental improvements on long-established alternatives as opposed to more radical breakthroughs.
The Internet - The internet is not going away anywhere, only to permeate and make itself more and more ubiquitous. The fund views that  “Internet companies that will outperform are the companies that take the Internet seriously – as a technology for transferring information on a scale and at a level of convenience that can’t be replicated elsewhere – and that have a plan for translating those advantages into cash“
Founders fund has managed so far to invest in serious companies of the likes of SpaceX, Palantir technologies, Zocdoc, Causes, Practice Fusion and Pathway Genomics.The fund carries more of an altruistic and ideal motto, which is deserving given the legacy of the people on its board. For after all, if the topmost thinkers , entrepreneurs and VCs in the industry do not encourage far-flung goals and ideas and drive change, who will?

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In the end, social-bashing is alright but the takeaway is not to devalue the importance of social, rather to realize the value of technology beyond just social. It would serve us well when our best engineers, thinkers and entrepreneurs start to make forays into higher impact territory. And that is way easier said than done. An ambitious technologist wants to solve the complex technological problems of building a large-scale highly distributed computing system infrastructure used by millions of consumers, of delivering enterprise-grade performance. A company building a non-serious application but flush with cash may still provide him the means and satisfaction of work that is complex and challenging, hence lowering the motivation to look elsewhere. Likewise, being an entrepreneur is tough no matter what your end goal is. The on-the-ground realities make it as challenging doing a business that is based on building a tic-tac-toe game for social sharing as is building a business to radicalize or democratize education. In both cases the entrepreneur is required to build a company vision, attract and lead talent, spend hours burning the midnight oil, struggle through endless trial and error, build monetization strategies (who is going to pay for a silly game on the internet anyway, and therefore how do you make any decent money to pay off your staff and investors?). In the midst of this, glory stories woven around a successful narrative with a media focussed on acquisitions, early exits, founder triumph and sector hype can make us succumb to the path of least resistance to succeed in a hyper-competitive environment. Nonetheless, it is important to step back, to think and to have the conversation. It is only when we start to think and talk about it, will we be encouraged to remotely do anything about it.