Hard Tech Funding

It's not clear that the technology is far enough along to the point where startups could be profitable. Sometimes it takes a big government funded project to lay the groundwork (e.g. the space race).

Probably investors just not "feeling" like it. Real advancements in tech need years of R&D funding before they can come to fruition; most of the venture capital industry is hell-bent on short term numbers and PowerPoint hockey stick curves and not hard promising science.

Just crowdsource a few billion $ for R&D and we are good to go.

Seems like Theranos, UBeam etc have no trouble raising money, despite every domain expert saying their goals are impossible according to our current understanding of physics

It's a good idea but the issue is convincing big money to buy in. Without billions of dollars invested this tech will just get thrown in the back with all of the other world changing technologies that need billions of dollars of investment to succeed.

Yeah, I’m not surprised (tell me about funding…); even so, seeing it in black&white is still a gut-punch.I mean, any one of FAANG alone could easily run a PARC or VPRI just off loose change in their kitchen kitty. And sure, it’s totally speculative blue-sky R&D that might [probably] never pan out; yet if no-one ever splurged on such gambles now and again we’d all be here having this argument by parchment and quill pen instead!We learn by trying and failing, not by being afra

I still believe in the idea of Theranos and while I think it is great the Ev Williams was able to secure funding 2 more times to keep rebuilding different versions of blogger[0], I want to live in a world where we also take huge gambles on hard problems. If we adhere to VC math (we should as this hypothetical is for VC investing) one of these payouts will be well worth it, e.g. Tesla/SpaceX. So yeah, I'd write down uBeam & Theranos, but you can fuck off if you want the world to st

Or: It doesn't matter how many billions you spend on a problem if the core technology isn't there. Scientific discovery advances based on curiosity and open experimentation. That even includes when we "know" how to do the things but its not miniaturized enough yet. Imagine being a company tasked with inventing the walkman 10 or 15 years before it was possible. You'd end up with some crazy designs.

It's a great thing that they can throw half a trillion at something that may not work. Every great tech advancement came from throwing money at something which might not work.

It's like if only we put more resources towards potential societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors aren't very comfortable with projects outside their domain knowledge and expect an quick return. Quaise last financing round was something like $20M...