I love working in tech. I quit a legal career when I saw my chance to get off the corporate track and I’ve no regrets about that.

When we came up with our team manifesto to try and sum up what we believe in, it amounted to: “We believe in the power of great design to make a difference in the world.”

But I really believe that to drive change and fix certain problems, we need more than just people with great intentions working on a small scale. As much as it’s fun to mock big corporations for their inefficiency and bureaucracy, they’re sometimes necessary. Sometimes, we need companies and teams who are big enough to tackle the biggest of problems.

Yes, I’ve read 1984 and a healthy amount of Asimov and Phillip K. Dick. And I too worry about the potential for governments spying on us with the technology we’ve created, and shady companies using our data for nefarious deeds. Our data security is not a problem that we can easily sweep under the rug and ignore.

And yes, Google has its fingers in a lot of pies. They’re digitising books, relentlessly tracking our search history, owning more and more of our data and freaking people out by doing occasionally crazy things with location services.

I can’t deny I was a bit shocked when Google Maps first interrupted my music to tell me to “get off the bus now” as my stop approached.

But while it’s sensible to be cautious, I don’t believe that being “big” is inherently bad. So many startups fail to do anything meaningful. Do we really need another camera app or a startup based around selling us more stuff? Are we really using the technology we have to its maximum potential?

We used to imagine that technology would easily solve the world’s biggest problems—yet many of these problems still exist despite seeming eminently solvable. Problems like generating safe, clean and cheap energy, and ensuring that everyone has warmth and shelter. As Peter Thiel said:

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”

Sure, you’ve got some small and incredibly ambitious startups trying to do big things, and they’re starting to get recognition and funding for this. But most people see these kind of “big problems” as just too out-of-reach to even contemplate. Which is why too few startups are trying to work on them.

Who other than a major company is going to launch a project as audacious as Loon? Who will take on the challenge of building entirely new transport methods or investing heavily in making self-driving cars a reality? How many companies out there are willing to spend mental attention and valuable resources to tackle these big problems?

For a long time, I’ve had a huge amount of respect for Apple’s design ethos. It’s hard to deny that they’ve played a huge role in pushing industrial design forward and teaching other companies the value of great design. That makes a difference. And perhaps they just might have some really game-changing ideas lurking about in their labs. But if we’re looking at the potential over the next few decades, it’s clear that Google is the more exciting company that’s more likely to be the driving force in innovation through more meaningful ways.

We’re not talking about smarter televisions and thinner phones here—incremental evolutions on what came before. We’re talking about entirely new innovations that’ll genuinely be life-changing. Thiel calls it vertical growth:

“So the developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level. And to the extent people don’t believe this is going to happen, you see a lot more pessimism about the future.”

I think Google is certainly one of the innovators looking to achieve that.