I read the article, which is kind of clueless. Nice pics, though. Any history book of Silicon Valley details the origin of organized VC. After reading that, yo

I read the article, which is kind of clueless. Nice pics, though. Any history book of Silicon Valley details the origin of organized VC. After reading that, you can understand the overall context of informality before that. Also, saying Tesla was funded by Westinghouse is a strange way to look at it - his patents were used to create the company in the first place. If you're interested in seeing those "heavy metal" early inventions in person, I highly recommend the Henry Ford and Greenfield Village in Michigan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Henry_Ford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Henry_Ford For a more modern example, Frank Robinson founded Robinson Helicopter in SoCal, which is the world's largest producer of helicopters by shipments. I think he self-funded his first R22 prototype, then a local businessman who was intrigued invested after that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Helicopter_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Helicopter_Company Similar to SpaceX, Robinson had to in-source a lot of components to get the repeatable, aerospace-level reliability needed. The R22 and R44 are the dominant helicopters used in flight training, LEO and newsgathering in the USA and are about 25% of the cost of a Bell helicopter, so a real game-changer.