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The US government picked winners like Intel, saving the US semiconductor industry through protectionist policies. (http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepin
by calibraxis 15y ago
The US government picked winners like Intel, saving the US semiconductor industry through protectionist policies. (http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepinnacor.html http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/10/1010grovepinnacor.html) In fact, the US technology industry was developed through enormous subsidy, from transistors to the internet.
Economist Ha-Joon Chang discusses that's how powerful nations develop. The entrepreneurial Japanese government's first forays into the auto industry were failures, but of course they kept at it, learning from failure. That's the nature of investment, as any HN reader should know.
- Symmetry 15y agoJapan's record isn't that good - MITI tried to strangle both Japanese auto exports and the semiconductor industry in their cradle because they didn't conform to Japan's development plan.
- astrodust 15y agoSony's initial plan was rice cookers.
- arethuza 15y agoMy experience of government "investment" (both UK and EU) in the technology sector is that is has been the most frightful waste of money imaginable. It's not down to lack of money - but the way it has been spent.
- astrodust 15y agoYou have to remember how many failures it takes to have a big success. For every Intel there's a wasteland of shoulda-been companies that are dead and forgotten, with billions invested having gone up in smoke. Of course, when it's private venture capital that's behind this, people don't seem to complain as much.
- arethuza 15y agoHonestly, I've been in a couple of startups (including one that got a lot of funding from VCs and going public) and I've never seen anything like the inefficiency that was normal in the public sector projects that I worked on. Not that I'm against public funding of research - I'm absolutely not. But my experiences of public sector research funding on "large" projects completely put me off working in that sector (so much so that I left academia to co-found a start-up).
- easp 15y agoPublicly funded projects are such an inefficient mess, in part, because of all the shit that is done to make sure that tax dollars aren't "wasted."
- EvilLook 15y agoTrue that. I've worked on publicly funded projects and in the private sector. The publicly funded projects were the worst for pointless reporting, accounting, and paperwork. In the private sector, the boss pops his head in and asks what I've done to day and what I'll finish by the end of the week, and we adjust goals. It takes about 5 minutes a week to do this. When I was working on a publicly funded project, there was a report to be filed every day that took an hour of my time to do, a report to be filed every week that took about three hours over the course of the week, meeting with management to make sure that the first two reports were complete, accurate, and not fudged which took an additional two hours a week, and an end of the month assessment for both spending and time clocked in that took about twelve hours over the course of a month. So guess where I'm more productive.
- arethuza 15y agoThat was probably the single biggest issue, although there were others, there was a huge administrative overhead on all of the projects that it made it difficult to spot where any actual research was being done.
- astrodust 15y agoI would speculate that you're probably more selective about the kinds of companies you work for than a VC is in funding them. There have been some legendary turkeys over the last ten years, but for every pets.com or hairdryersbyemail.com there's dozens of others so misguided you never heard a thing, they just went nowhere fast.