Nicole Perlroth
Forbes
9/12/2011
Max Levchin and Peter Thiel are not ones to mince words.
“Innovation in this country is somewhere between dire straits and dead,” Levchin said at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference today.
PayPal’s co-founders are collaborating on a book with Russian grand chestmaster Garry Kasparov called The Blueprint about what they see as the slow decline of innovation in the U.S. and what to do about it.
“If you look outside the computer and the internet, there has been 40 years of stagnation,” said Thiel, who pointed to one of his favorite examples: transportation. ”We are no longer moving faster,” Thiel noted. Transportation speeds, which accelerated across history, peaked with the debut of the Concord in 1976. One decade after 9/11, Thiel says, we are back to the travel speeds of the 1960s.
The article continues at Forbes.
