> Regarding your idea about a new type of Y-Combinator-style model for funding science, I like the idea. It seems to me that incubators like Y-Combinator are m

> Regarding your idea about a new type of Y-Combinator-style model for funding science, I like the idea. It seems to me that incubators like Y-Combinator are more enmeshed in / perpetuate the short-termism that has so drastically affected basic research. I mean, from what I understand the funders for HARC pulled out only a little after a year. > academia isn't immune from these short-term pressures. This is 100% true. It's true because the "short-term pressures" are wider changes to economic culture that have emerged since the late 70s. Some fairly call this neoliberalism, but it's plain enough to just link it to the maxim of shareholder primacy that really took flight from that period. The expectation that markets are so fundamental that typically non-economic activity could even be governed by market "laws" became a kind of wisdom incubated in the high prestige MBA programs and leaked out as "management theory" about how organizations should be run. In short, Universities are now run more like businesses than they used to be (a glut of extra "managers" everywhere in the hierarchy, a "customer first" approach). That pressure extends down to the actual academics doing the work. They have less support, less funding, and must seek grants from increasingly short-term thinking institutions. This is a far cry from the ARPA network of university researchers that gave us the largest qualitative leaps in computing. Universities and even the conditions of the grant funding were much more open and flexible back then. It should not be surprising that we are still largely using systems and methods designed in the 60s/70s (looking at you, Unix) because that's the end of this important period.