According to some doomsayers — such as engineering professor and entrepreneur Steve Blank in a recent interview with The Atlantic — innovation is dead and Silicon Valley is just a muck pond full of VC money where social media companies breed and reproduce like mosquitoes. They’re partially right, of course, but they’re also missing the bigger picture. Much of Silicon Valley’s most-innovative efforts might be coming out of Google and Elon Musk’s mind, as Blank says, but cloud computing has made innovation something anyone can do.
Todd Hoff of High Scalability took up for today’s startups against Blank in a post on Monday detailing Pinterest’s phenomal growth and growing Amazon Web Services-based infrastructure. Here’s what he had to say to the naysayers:
