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?
Conversation
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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I’m making this arithmetic comparison because SV investors sometimes act like basic research is entirely out of their reach and all they can do is draft off of output of big government R&D programs running over decades. This is just not true anymore.
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SV people tend to be free market ideologues, yet their free market idealism mysteriously vanishes when talking about this stuff. SoftBank alone could fund something like this probably.
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And indie research would dispense with indirect cost support (~50% overhead charge that research universities typically charge agencies to pay for brick-and-mortar infrastructure, a big innovation in its time, due to Vannevar Bush).
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Basically there’s a bullshit R&D funnel argument that people trot out to explain slowing of new business formation and general innovation stagnation/falling business dynamism (similar to the one around diversity in tech hiring).
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The research university model worked well for about 60 years after WW2. It supplied both the talent and the IP feedstock (not just STEM, humanities/liberal arts as well) to drive American business growth an leadership. Z
Basically free in-kind money for the innovation economy.
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Now that model is struggling, I have to wonder why huge capital stocks created from that legacy investment aren’t being plowed back into the head of the funnel.
Possibly SV has gotten used to easy private wealth building off of publicly funded feedstock.
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I think the R&D loop can be closed with tech wealth and investment capital. Universities can be unbundled. There’s no good reason to keep teaching, research, and service in the same costly brick and mortar bundle anymore.
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This is not well thought through. Many mistakes here. 1/NSF career grants are not "all of university system".
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It’s a deliberately focused comparison on the startup phase that allow research careers to be bootstrapped. I am aware that total funding is vastly larger. I am not suggesting undermining the university system, merely providing an alternative to it for independent researchers.
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I think that the timescale of the most impactful projects can be much longer than would be supported by "investors". The payoff for basic research can be 10,20,50 years down the road, but multiply entire economies by big factors. It's a social investment.

