Thinking about my thread this morning on why independent research is hard, and what it would take to make it possible, and whether it’s within the reach of private investors who ALL complain endlessly about how they have far too much capital and don’t know where to put it.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1195789557465153536 …
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On one extreme you can think UBI, which is roughly ~ early grad student level $. On the other extreme, you could think of early career faculty grants. An NSF CAREER grant is 100k/year for 5 yrs, and in 2018, about 150 million was disbursed or about 300.
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A subset of ~20 get PECASE awards which push up the 100k to 500k/yr, sp that’s another 40 million. This 190 million basically supports 300 new faculty every year which I think is approximately ALL new faculty in say the top 25-30 universities.
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At grad student stipend level, you’re talking about a quarter that. 25k/year. So you could support about 1200 grad student level researchers for the same amount. So $19- million gets you somewhere between 300 to 1200 bets on independent researchers. Now who can afford that?
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Let’s look at Silicon Valley. Last I checked, Series A, B, C, and D rounds are ~10 million, 20mm, 50mm, 100mm. Might be off by a bit. So... doubling research capacity of entire university system = 20 As, 10 Bs, 4 Cs, or 2 Ds. Entirely within the capacity of SV capital market
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Replying to @vgr
Why do you only consider CAREER grants? NSF research budget is $7 billion a year, and the NIH is $39 billion.
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Getting bootstrapped is the hardest part.
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