I'd like to write a comment but I generally prefer to have read the entire article before I do... see you in a week or so.
Jokes aside, I agree with the author (I think) that DARPA has been a surprisingly effective org in an age of frequent failures of other orgs with similarly lofty goals.
DARPA is effectively what things like the SoftBank Vision Fund should've been (wanted to be?). It would certainly be interesting to see what it would look like to have a privately run clone of DARPA if you injected as much cash as the Vision Fund did. Per the article, about $400M/y is spent on actual R&D by DARPA, where as Vision Fund has injected that amount into single companies many times over.
Vision Fund is there to throw huge amounts of money at a business in order to ramp it up quickly and capture large, global markets.
Think Uber: disrupting the Taxi business (or just regulations ...). Once something like Uber starts to work, a 'Vision Fund' takes this fledgling thing and backs it with billions to conquer the world.
It's not about moon-shots, it's about market power and speed on a global scale.
Like hyper-supercharged 'Round C or D' - instead of doing an initial public offering for cash, you take on massive cash from Vision.
Wether or not it will work is something else, but there's logic there.
Jokes aside, I agree with the author (I think) that DARPA has been a surprisingly effective org in an age of frequent failures of other orgs with similarly lofty goals.
DARPA is effectively what things like the SoftBank Vision Fund should've been (wanted to be?). It would certainly be interesting to see what it would look like to have a privately run clone of DARPA if you injected as much cash as the Vision Fund did. Per the article, about $400M/y is spent on actual R&D by DARPA, where as Vision Fund has injected that amount into single companies many times over.