> But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually b

> But, the logic behind "many long-shot bets in parallel" is inherently more difficult to explain in the political arena, which is why I think VC may actually be better at some of these kinds of things This does not mean the VC will actually be better at the task (producing better basic research results), but that it is more realistically going to get the funding in the current climate. If you look at what's worked for computing in the past -- where the real qualitative changes came from, in terms of basic research -- you have ARPA, PARC, and Bell Labs. They all had the following in common: - Long-term time horizons of 5-10 years minimum; - Lots of funding with few strings attached - Funded people, not projects - Operated in a given context, but goals were vague (enough freedom to play) Any funding model that is sensitive to the pressures of quarterly earnings reports is not going to be able to do any of this. Which is precisely why most of the improvements in computing since the early 80s have come as side effects from quantitative improvements like speed, memory, cost, etc. The current computing culture, and especially the funding model behind it, will not give us the big new inventions we hope for.