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The a16z Show

a16z Podcast: Startups as Science Experiments -- Can VC Disrupt Academia?

The a16z Show

a16z

Culture, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Software Eating The World, Disruption, Business, Technology, Science

4.21.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2014

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's a myth that startups happen in isolation. Those legendary two people in a garage are often building on the deep and basic research -- long funded by government and conducted in universities -- that has come before it. But with the advent of the ...

Transcript

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0:00.0

So I'm VJ Ponday, I'm a professor at Stanford, but also in an interesting new role here as a sort of professor in residence at Andreessen Horowitz.

0:08.0

Towards that end, you know, there's a couple interesting things that we can think about for how a venture can disrupt academia and how academia can be disrupted in an interesting way.

0:18.0

And so one way that we talked about is related to Bill Janeway's hypothesis

0:23.3

that investing, especially long-term basic science investing over decades, is really what's

0:30.4

responsible for the success that we see in IT, and that biotech hasn't had quite that time yet,

0:37.3

and that clean tech has really had nothing close to that.

0:40.3

But now with government probably not be able to put the same type of money and emphasis into things, how we're going to have the seed corn for the future?

0:48.3

Yeah, so this is, for those of you haven't read Bill, so Bill Janeway is a venture capitalist and actually a PhD in economics who studied from a student of Keynes. And so he's kind of straight in the, what is it,

0:57.7

the Oxford sort of lineage of economics. So he's both a practitioner and academic. And his book

1:02.2

is called Doing Capitalism. And it's probably the best single book on the theory of venture capital

1:06.5

that I think came out last year. So one of those books came out from academic press, and so it's got like a terribly ugly cover and like no marketing.

1:13.3

And so nobody's heard of it.

1:14.4

But it's a fantastic, it's an absolutely outstanding book.

1:17.5

And so, yeah, what he basically observes.

1:19.0

He says, look, Venture Capital has tried to engage in all these categories.

1:22.4

IT has been a huge success. success, it turns out four decades of federal R&D money preceded venture capital success

1:27.7

in IT.

1:28.7

Biotech has been a moderate success, two decades of federal R&D money.

1:32.1

And then everything else has just been a train wreck with Clean Tech being the most recent

1:35.9

train wreck.

1:36.9

And he says, look, there was no federal research funding.

1:39.3

The federal government went straight to industry subsidies without passing through R&D. And so consequently there was no, literally, there was nothing to draw on.

...

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