[sousousou]

Sometimes I worry about the incentives for innovation in the US.

Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors. Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product. Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.

End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.

Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.

[asdff]

This is what I struggled with after grad school. You have so many decent ideas. So many people you know in the domain also with their own good ideas. Everyone looking for their next gig. It could all be so easy to get a couple people together and start building. But, alas, money, that must come from people who expect more money back before long, which severely limits the scope of ideas that will get investor funding. No moonshots, no sci fi future, just same old looking for low hanging arbitrage or rent seeking opportunities. Kinda sad when you realize that is pretty much all private tech investment because funding is driven by investors ultimately, and not scientists like what you see on grant review panels for basic research. Money must make more money, which again limits severely what money can do.

[EQmWgw87pw]

Do you think most YC companies make money?

[dboreham]

This is why the empires are accidental.

[bmitc]

I'm fairly convinced that the U.S. has chosen the worst models possible to innovate.

Giant corporations control everything, even government laws, regulations, and policies. They will buy up any competition, patent themselves toward a moat, squash competition they don't want to buy, etc.

Venture captialism doesn't care about true value or some actual addition to society. It's a giant grift just to make more money from money. They chase every trend and hype train ad nauseum. It was self-driving cars, then cryptocurrencies/blockchain, and now gen AI. The vast majority of these companies have no value to society or long-term innovation.

The government invests in areas, but a huge amount of it goes to the black hole of defense contractors. And academic institutions in the U.S. are incredibly wasteful with money and spend all their time trying to fundraise money at the same time.

Just the entire system is inefficient and effectively broken.

For example, YC announced calls for climate tech a few years ago: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/rfs-climatetech. Where did that go? I looked up YC companies in the climate space (https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer%202026&ba...), and there's only 22 companies out of the several thousand YC companies. So where's the value? Most of the companies aren't hiring and just seem like vaporware. And if you look at the leadership, almost all of them are serial VC/startup people and not actual innovators, experts, or professionals.

[SilverElfin]

The real solution is to break up megacorps, tax them heavily, and also tax the wealth of ultra wealthy billionaires. This will let competition happen in a more sustainable way. Otherwise every startup ends up being acquired or copied by one of the megacorp or dies.

[kgabis]

I wonder what makes EU so wealthy to just buy stuff everywhere - maybe it's the export of high-end technologies inaccessible to US and China?

[lossolo]

> "Get bankrolled by the state at the state's discretion until they get what they want, even if they need to burn $1B to get $1M of value"

If that's how it worked, they wouldn't lead in anything, they'd be bankrupt already. They burn state money like VCs burn cash. DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc., disprove your point.