Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops

[Lamplighter]

The entire culture of Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship around the globe,
has taken on a groupthink that prevents truly novel inventions, like the Hyperloop, from reaching the market.
The result is a major loss. It’s a loss to our society. It’s a loss to our capital markets.
It’s a loss to private investors. And it’s a loss to entrepreneurs.

I stopped reading the link, and LOL'ed when I read his complaint about
hedge funds making huge profits based microsecond-trading
of minute (tiny) stock price differences (e.g., Chicago vs New York exchanges).
But what does his "truly novel invention" do ?
... it proposes to get a few people to their destination some minute (time) quicker.

He is really only talking about how to gamble $ on the stock exchanges,
not inventions that have serious, life-changing, implications.

One example of recent life-changers inventions would be the personal computer vs.
the iphone/ipad/ipod/icloud/etc. products and "personal advertising" that investors are betting on now.
I see the latter as popular entertainments, and as such will fade,
just the way TV entertainment has faded under the onslaught of info-mercials, etc.

Google and MicroSoft being the best examples of corporations that have/are changing missions,
and will probably suffer under the investor (aka gambling) pressures of Wall Street.

What is ironic here is that Google just won it's multi-year court battle to scan all printed books
... to create a database allowing anyone to search for anything...
based not on copyright law, but on the concept of providing a service for the "good of the public".
This is diametrically opposed to the current concept of investors in the digital world.