> 1. Companies that made a business out of doing SBIR grants (I think the previous poster may have meant the same with SBIR farms). They write one grant after a

> 1. Companies that made a business out of doing SBIR grants (I think the previous poster may have meant the same with SBIR farms). They write one grant after another and do some BS research, write reports and in the end, trash the results and move to the next SBIR This was kind of my experience, though it isn't quite so malicious generally. The overhead in setting up the contract, while not ridiculous, is enough that once you get one, you usually end up getting another, and so on until you become an SBIR farm. The grants come in phases, Phase 1 being research and proposal, Phase 2 prototype, and Phase 3 basically being follow on contracts for production/continued development. You have to get them in order and if you only farm Phase 1 contracts you won't get super far. That said getting past Phase 2 is quite hard as the kind of stuff they generally ask for (weird one off fixes for various government procurement requirements) don't generally commercialize well. They're frequently moonshot type efforts for the size of businesses they're targeting and the ROI is low unless you're using them to build and pay a team for some other goal. That said, if your goal is to build a team/small facility and you know what you're doing, it's not a bad option. It just isn't really anything like what the rest of the software world's VC funding model.