TR: What concerns you the most about the startup culture today?

Levchin: I feel like we should be aiming higher. The founders of a number of startups I encounter have no real intent of getting anywhere huge. They just want to build a company that is likely to get acquired for a meaningful, but not necessarily enormous, amount of money. The acquisition price doesn't really matter, but it serves relatively well to measure the consequence of the startup and therefore indirectly measures the ambition of the founders at the outset.

What's wrong with building a company in hopes it will be acquired?

I think it is less likely to result in truly revolutionary or groundbreaking companies being created. In Silicon Valley, the number of startups that could be easily confused with a feature [of some other service] is increasing relatively rapidly.

//

Am I misremembering that he sold his company Slide to Google for a "meaningful, but not necessarily enormous, amount of money"?

Oh, he addresses that:

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.

I'm glad to see I'm not the only person who sees this tendency towards mediocrity....