a16z Podcast: Startups as Science Experiments -- Can VC Disrupt Academia?
The a16z Show
a16z
4.2 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 2 October 2014
⏱️ 23 minutes
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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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