I have given this topic a lot of thought and I sincerely believe that we get what we do in the marketplace because that is where investment has gone and because that is what consumers have responded to. There is no shortage of ambitious startups trying to do hard things. The problem is, the consumer marketplace isn't there for it and investors, broadly speaking, aren't willing to put the money into ventures which have 5-10 year tails. VC's all want 3 year exits. You can't do basic science in that time, and real research takes much longer than that.
With a few notable exceptions these big investments don't exist for "startups" and really never have, they have largely relied on government funding in some form or fashion for the big breakthroughs - PARC and the beginnings of SV all come immediately to mind.
Unless investors start looking long term as the standard, rather than the exception, this isn't going to change. That or government needs to get back into the game, but that seems like it's gone as a viable option.
Exactly. I've written about this at length because people who don't have much experiences in the hard science/engineering fields have a vast disconnect between what's possible in software vs. what's possible in the physical world. Startups are great for pure software and very simple and constrained science/engineering experiments. These, by definition, won't be groundbreaking.
Big science/engineering is very expensive, very long term and very risky. No one wants to foot the bill. Not corporations, not investors, and recently not even governments (NIH/NSF funding cuts, etc.).
By "physical world" we don't necessarily have to do some groundbreaking theoretical physics discovery. Software like online collaboration tools, marketplace apps and search engines have already greatly transformed the way people interact and work. Isn't that change "physical"? Way too many people who study "hard science" end up being able to contribute nothing and just drop out of the field, or just passing their time on pointless researches supported by funds. The field was already overpopulated and what makes it worse is that its hard problems are few to come by and solving them requires luck. If you are out of luck then you're wasting your life. This is different from the world of software where you are almost always doing things that have an immediate positive effect on the lives around you.
With a few notable exceptions these big investments don't exist for "startups" and really never have, they have largely relied on government funding in some form or fashion for the big breakthroughs - PARC and the beginnings of SV all come immediately to mind.
Unless investors start looking long term as the standard, rather than the exception, this isn't going to change. That or government needs to get back into the game, but that seems like it's gone as a viable option.