[random4369]

> SV as a whole is substantially a creation of military spending.

This is a national budget problem. If you're in the tech world long enough, it becomes pretty clear that the only way to get Big funding is through military affiliation.

This puts a huge selective bias on what kind of technology projects actually get big funding, and further it prevents the benefits of those projects from reaching the community for years, because the military overlords demand secrecy sole use of the technology until it gets superceded.

We need to cut a huge chunk out of the military budget and give it directly to the tech sector, so that big innovative projects are actually possible without having to be military.

[hueving]

>This is a national budget problem

Lookup "the secret history of silicon valley". There was no tech world in the bay and massive funding for radar research post-WW2 bootstrapped what is now silicon valley.

It's not a national budget problem, it's just the history of why things happened in SV.

[TuringNYC]

Doesn't the recent (last 10yrs) VC splash do that? Hard to tell numbers since military spending has so many routes, but i'd love to see numbers on the two channels.

[abalone]

No, they are not parallel channels. Generally speaking high tech develops over a multi decade timeframe. Govt agencies like DARPA play a lead role in the earliest phase (often measured in double digit years). VCs pick outputs that have commercial potential and pour money into the sector.

That’s why it’s wrong to just compare the absolute amounts invested — it’s when it’s invested.