On waste in DoD, sure, but not the parts I was talking about. Some of the big waste was, say, getting AC working in Iraq and now getting Diesel fuel and jet fuel to Akrapistan. And the cost of the black oil to send a destroyer across the Pacific would really set one back.
> Also you appear not to have any idea how much waste exists in Pentagon contracting.
Nonsense. All my early career was in DoD work, mostly in research, especially in applied math. E.g., I saved a project to improve the system that keeps an SSBN at the right depth in rough seas (and, thus, got my company a nice development contract). I found a solution to a problem of global nuclear war limited to sea, apparently later sold to a place near Langley, VA. I reduced to simple Lagrangian relaxation and the Kuhn-Tucker conditions a problem in non-linear, integer, max-min for evaluating the SSBN fleet. I know my way around the DC beltway, out to Vienna, VA, down Shirley Highway, up to Howard County, etc. very well, thank you.
What I saw in DoD spending was quite efficient, amazingly so.
For academic research, it takes some effort to understand it and how it can connect with entrepreneurship. Much of academic research is too far from real products for my tastes, and I complained about that when I was a grad student and, by accident for a while, a prof.
Still, the best of academic research is by far the best stuff, including for entrepreneurship. But it is crucial to pick and choose. And how to connect from academics to entrepreneurship is not so easy to see at first glance, varies across subjects, easy in some fields of engineering, super tough in some other fields, has varied across time, especially in recent years, but, net, in many cases can be quite easy, efficient, and effective.
The idea that the academic research is just generalized abstract nonsense and Greek chicken tracks is dangerously misinformed: In simple, blunt terms, for the technical areas of research, it is funded for essentially one purpose from essentially one source. The source is Congress, and the purpose is US national security. E.g., that's where Silicon Valley came from. Along with microelectronics. And the Internet. And the last I heard, the Department of Energy funded the BSD effort at Berkeley, and Congress funds that department also mostly just for national security.
In funding this research, Congress is quite correct, amazingly so. The beginning of the movie on Nash was correct: Essentially math research won WWII. No joke.
You are correct that SV would not be able to deploy the results of the research the way the DoD often does, but you are wrong to assume that there is nothing that SV could do. First, notice that much of the best research, especially for 'information technology', is done dirt cheap, typically by one person with paper and pencil. Second, notice that now with current computing, in a major fraction of cases, such research can be deployed at shockingly low cost. Not all research has to be as expensive to deploy as the B-2 bomber or GPS satellites.
There are many ways to waste money, and for SV to waste money. And PG's essay indicated some serious struggles in project evaluation. And there are plenty of posts, e.g., by Mark Suster, that on average VC ROI over the past 10 years sucks. So, SV is wasting money now.
But there are also some ways to make money, and I gave some rock solid ideas for how, based on research.
Long ago I guessed that no one would believe me short of my having a 300 foot yacht in Long Island Sound. By then I'm not sure I'll still give a sh!t about telling people things they so much don't want to hear.
"Nothing concrete"? SURE there is. Just read what I wrote.
I said to pick an important, unsolved problem and then to do some research to find a powerful solution.
For what is 'research', get a Ph.D. from a good research university. For how to do research that yields a solution powerful for an important problem, get a job in a lab, e.g., a DoD lab, that does such work. For how to take a powerful solution to an important problem and make money with it, be an entrepreneur -- that is, write some corresponding software and start a business.
If you will lower your ego and read, you might learn something, e.g., a solution to what PG, VCs, SV, and LPs are struggling with, i.e., how to get "big wins" and how to know early on that a project has high promise of a big win.
A war story: The SSBNs were well on the way to sea, and the question of navigation was noticed. An SSBN didn't want to have to surface for navigation. So, there was inertial navigation, but something more accurate was desired. So some physics guys worked out navigation satellites. Their derivations and proposal were short. The Navy evaluated their proposal, approved it, and the project was 100% wildly successful. The lab where the work was done navigated its position to within 1 foot. The GPS system was later, by the Air Force, and better, but the original Navy system was quite good. At one point, the Navy system, to have a better means of measuring the gravitational field of the earth, wanted a satellite with no drag. Some research found one. I will leave for you just how to do that!
This is so silly. You don't have a startup idea until you have a product that you can sell to Grandma, that will work for her on a standalone basis. It can't require an Act of God to take it market. It has to be cheap enough that Grandma can buy it, and it has to be simple enough that it can be built by 3 guys in a shack in Palo Alto.
Often this means taking stuff that exists already and chopping off the most expensive features, even if they are the best features, to make it cheap enough for Grandma. Whole books have been published on this; lookup "The Innovator's Dilemma".
This is a completely different goal from the goals of research, which has to be new to be published. Taking an old idea, even which was impractical to build/deploy, and productizing it, is a very hard sell to the professors and very difficult to get published papers out of.
(Some academics just do not care about practicalities, no matter how hard one tries to persuade them.)
Both these situations are also completely different from the military, who care about maximum effectiveness even if it means throwing money at problems and even if it means redeploying the very oldest ideas. If a ceramic capacitor works, instead of a funky DSP algorithm, they'll use the ceramic capacitor. If it somehow proves necessary to defend against a nuclear attack, they'll switch the ceramic capacitor for a solid gold ingot in a heartbeat.
On waste in DoD, sure, but not the parts I was talking about. Some of the big waste was, say, getting AC working in Iraq and now getting Diesel fuel and jet fuel to Akrapistan. And the cost of the black oil to send a destroyer across the Pacific would really set one back.
> Also you appear not to have any idea how much waste exists in Pentagon contracting.
Nonsense. All my early career was in DoD work, mostly in research, especially in applied math. E.g., I saved a project to improve the system that keeps an SSBN at the right depth in rough seas (and, thus, got my company a nice development contract). I found a solution to a problem of global nuclear war limited to sea, apparently later sold to a place near Langley, VA. I reduced to simple Lagrangian relaxation and the Kuhn-Tucker conditions a problem in non-linear, integer, max-min for evaluating the SSBN fleet. I know my way around the DC beltway, out to Vienna, VA, down Shirley Highway, up to Howard County, etc. very well, thank you.
What I saw in DoD spending was quite efficient, amazingly so.
For academic research, it takes some effort to understand it and how it can connect with entrepreneurship. Much of academic research is too far from real products for my tastes, and I complained about that when I was a grad student and, by accident for a while, a prof.
Still, the best of academic research is by far the best stuff, including for entrepreneurship. But it is crucial to pick and choose. And how to connect from academics to entrepreneurship is not so easy to see at first glance, varies across subjects, easy in some fields of engineering, super tough in some other fields, has varied across time, especially in recent years, but, net, in many cases can be quite easy, efficient, and effective.
The idea that the academic research is just generalized abstract nonsense and Greek chicken tracks is dangerously misinformed: In simple, blunt terms, for the technical areas of research, it is funded for essentially one purpose from essentially one source. The source is Congress, and the purpose is US national security. E.g., that's where Silicon Valley came from. Along with microelectronics. And the Internet. And the last I heard, the Department of Energy funded the BSD effort at Berkeley, and Congress funds that department also mostly just for national security.
In funding this research, Congress is quite correct, amazingly so. The beginning of the movie on Nash was correct: Essentially math research won WWII. No joke.
You are correct that SV would not be able to deploy the results of the research the way the DoD often does, but you are wrong to assume that there is nothing that SV could do. First, notice that much of the best research, especially for 'information technology', is done dirt cheap, typically by one person with paper and pencil. Second, notice that now with current computing, in a major fraction of cases, such research can be deployed at shockingly low cost. Not all research has to be as expensive to deploy as the B-2 bomber or GPS satellites.
There are many ways to waste money, and for SV to waste money. And PG's essay indicated some serious struggles in project evaluation. And there are plenty of posts, e.g., by Mark Suster, that on average VC ROI over the past 10 years sucks. So, SV is wasting money now.
But there are also some ways to make money, and I gave some rock solid ideas for how, based on research.
Long ago I guessed that no one would believe me short of my having a 300 foot yacht in Long Island Sound. By then I'm not sure I'll still give a sh!t about telling people things they so much don't want to hear.