41–50 of 223 posts
Lets make it illegal to start a photo/location/$%^ sharing startup. That will clear the space upto 80%. I am just kidding, please don't down vote me if you are running such startup.
Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis.
Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point.
So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways.
You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information.
Yeah, every now and then somebody does this one thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place.
This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a goal that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough.
I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind.
If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car.
If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole point of blue-sky R&D funding is that you can't plan exactly what you're going to get out of it. Today DARPA is a bit more focused on practical application than it used to be, but it's ethos is still: "let's throw $10-30 million at a bunch of smart people and see what happens." The "plan" is to fund fundamental R&D and hope something really useful comes out of it. In that sense, the development of the inter…
DARPA is amazing, at least for their history and what has come from them. Dies any other country have a DARPA equivalent? Or, more specifically, did any other country have a DARPA equivalent 40+ years ago?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Very strong" and "more to come"? Pray tell, what in the following lists qualify as the sort of "big innovations" we're talking about? [1] http://a16z.com/portfolio/ [2] http://firstround.com/companies/ [3] http://www.kpcb.com/companies Don't get me wrong, these lists contain a lot of great products that I'm happy exist - but big and world-changing they are not. The fact that the typical SV VC scene funds one or two…
Big innovations from those lists (which I call things that are - or are intended to be - life-changing for a reasonably large number of people): airbnb, asana, box, facebook, github, meteor, picloud, pinterest, skype, stripe, twitter, uber, yourmechanic, discourse, fundersclub, hoteltonight, mint, onekingslane, simple, square, taskrabbit, coursera, groupon, nest, spotify,
Twitter is a more accessible version of RSS feed allowing way easier access to subjects of interest for non-tech-savvy people.
Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end.
But the people who succeed change the world.
Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole point of blue-sky R&D funding is that you can't plan exactly what you're going to get out of it. Today DARPA is a bit more focused on practical application than it used to be, but it's ethos is still: "let's throw $10-30 million at a bunch of smart people and see what happens." The "plan" is to fund fundamental R&D and hope something really useful comes out of it. In that sense, the development of the inter…
DARPA is amazing, at least for their history and what has come from them. Dies any other country have a DARPA equivalent? Or, more specifically, did any other country have a DARPA equivalent 40+ years ago?
I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products.
For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we want these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms.
I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy-to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes).
(b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project.
My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget-startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products?
It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that?
[0](http://invo.northwestern.edu/about) [1](http://cd2.northwestern.edu/)
"That's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer." Reasonable and astute point. "An Economist article this year exploring the state of innovation noted that centuries of scientific progress means it takes ever longer for peo…
There's no question that the government has some successes to point to. I actually agree that government is decent at some basic research.
Then again, the private sector has had plenty of successes as well.
My main objection is that we don't really understand the opportunity cost of having the government spend the money vs letting the private economy do so itself - yet we let the government continue to make the decisions on what's fair.