> Legally, Answer.AI is a company. But in practice, it might hover somewhere between a lab and a normal “profit-maximizing firm” — as was the case with Edison’s

> Legally, Answer.AI is a company. But in practice, it might hover somewhere between a lab and a normal “profit-maximizing firm” — as was the case with Edison’s lab. The founders seem perfectly content to pursue high-risk projects that might lead to failures or lack of revenue for quite a while. In saying this, I do not mean to imply they are content to light money on fire doing research with no chance of a return. Rather, they hope to fund a body of research projects that ideally have positive ROI in the long term. They are just not overly concerned with short-term revenue creation. This may be the biggest weakness. One things the greatest R&D labs had was a big cash cow that paid the bills. Bell Labs was funded by AT&T’s massive phone monopoly. PARC was funded by Xerox’ massive business. Lockheed Martin’s Skunkworks were paid by massive DoD contracts.