It's hard to find investors who will invest in just "the tech". Even in cases where it's clear to basically everyone that the structure of the market, the profi

It's hard to find investors who will invest in just "the tech". Even in cases where it's clear to basically everyone that the structure of the market, the profile of the customer, and the size or depth of the problem necessitate pursuing a technology strategy and not a product strategy out of the gate (and possibly for a long, long time). Even at early-stage investment, if you don't have a really specific product narrative doing a sound-bite sized thing, you'll get a lot of feedback about how it all needs to be very simple and you need to have a specific product definition. This is not a defense if Theranos, but rather just some insight into the ways that VC preferences, pattern-matching, and fairly simplistic capacity to vet anything through a "pitch" tend to distort how one goes about raising money and what one can reasonably raise money for. There probably needs to be some increased diversity in funding sources for "hard tech" problems. The issue I've always had with the concept of "MVP" is that it trivializes the problem space you can reasonably pursue, and collapses all the solutions into something you can throw together quickly, which also seriously distorts the incentives for rigor around making anything. It probably works fine for another Daily-Lifestyle-Thing-as-a-Service/App, but it seems less likely to work for something like creating a new sensor for an avionics system.