Technology startups, especially those in Silicon Valley, love to talk about innovation. But how good are they at actually inventing and commercializing important technologies? Not as good as they should be, says Max Levchin, a computer scientist who cofounded PayPal (earning him TR's "Innovator of the Year" award in 2002) and is now an angel investor. Levchin, along with fellow PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former chess champion Garry Kasparov, is completing a book called The Blueprint, which will outline how and why startups should tackle much harder problems. Levchin, 36, says too many of the country's best programmers are working for companies that have little prospect of doing anything ­transformative.

Levchin's own startup record is mixed. Although building PayPal's online payments technology into a trustworthy system was a technically difficult and risky project that ultimately prospered, he later founded Slide.com, which was best known for creating a somewhat silly series of Facebook applications such as Superpoke! Pets. Google bought Slide in 2010 for about $200 million but shut down most of its services last year.

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