The Price of the Decline of Innovation

So I’m going to finish up by talking about the national issues for a couple of minutes and then I'll take questions. I mentioned earlier that I believe that the national ecosystem has been in decline for several decades. And that we have come to a place where we have essentially an innovation deficit. Now, you could say why does this matter? We're in Silicon Valley. We're all entrepreneurs. We're going to go out and start companies. It does matter. It does matter because no business operates in a vacuum. And venture startups are influenced by big companies, because that has to do with where liquidity comes from. They are influenced by the capital markets. They are influenced by policies; whether it's something like Sarbanes-Oxley or patent laws. So, we do not operate in a vacuum and the national ecosystem really does matter to the success of Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in it. So if you think about where innovation has been done historically in the research community and startups, in large corporations, innovation in research started to close in in the 70s as funding for research started to decline and the way it was allocated became very almost bi-model, meaning things like physical sciences and environmental science, areas that we need so badly today, were absolutely starved in the 70s and 80s. While a lot of the funding went to IT and life sciences. Good for IT and life sciences. We needed it, but we needed it across the board. And when investing in research and basic science, you really want it to be very broad based. The other thing that happened is research funding became more risk-averse. The high risk, high return type of research that created the Internet is not as available today as it was once. Innovation and startups thrive through the 80s. But in the 90s, as we accelerated into the bubble, again, chasing money replaced the actual innovation. So I believe we became less innovative in the bubble. And then in the crash, ...