Max Levchin

is increasing relatively rapidly.

But what about big innovations in recent years like the rise of smart phones and social media?

There's a fair amount of disruptive technology going on. In general, the train of innovation is rolling along. I'm not too worried about innovation at large. The point I was trying to make is that there's an awful lot of effort being expended that is just never going to result in meaningful, truly disruptive innovation. And I think that's a problem. A lot of resources are getting soaked up by these lesser companies—most importantly, talented engineers, talented builders of things.

Why is this happening?

Typically these things go through the sieve of scarce resources—e.g., capital. When you try to raise money and your pitch sounds like "I'm going to look at that video game, clone it, and make it a little bit cheaper," under the right circumstances—under most circumstances—the potential backer says, "That's a terrible idea. I'm not giving a penny to this. Why don't you go invent something interesting?"

But the overabundance of capital that resulted from just enormous successes in Silicon Valley over the last few years has actually made it possible for such things to get funding, and they do. And so people are building things that are, at times, trivial.

In many respects, Slide seems as trivial as these other companies you think should be aiming higher. Do you wish you hadn't spent those years creating virtual pets?

Games and entertainment can aim pretty high. The world can occasionally be changed by an amazing piece of art or music or writing. At Slide we did some great work, but the result did fall short of my ambitions. I think the lesson learned for me was that I'm not that good at changing the world through art, and should stick to what I know: science.

Have you shaped your investments accordingly? Tell us about a startup you've backed that has a truly big idea.

I'm really excited about Kaggle. It's essentially a platform

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