Well, his argument is that well-funded, very intelligent people are trying like hell at computer vision, and not succeeding. That's not a good sign - you'd prefer that your space has been hitherto overlooked by smart people with lots of money.
I think he's arguing that computer vision is a research subject - most startups are doing known things (in the sense of "this has been successfully done before") or at most development ("this has been successfully done before - in the lab").