No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off

Posted by chmaynard 10/13/2025

No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off(steveblank.com)

724 points | 498 commentspage 5

flanked-evergl 10/13/2025|

Academia has become a racket that is actively hostile to technological progress. I want them to get exactly 0 of my tax money for anything.

LogicFailsMe 10/13/2025||

Tenured academia, sure, burn it to the ground, no survivors, mostly a temple of mean girls and enablers of those mean girls. Adjunct and other non-tenure track professors, however, not so much. They do the real work along with the postdocs and grad students. And they get the least recognition. And oh the bellyaching when they leave academia with no hope of a tenured position and 10x their salary by pivoting to industry.

anon84873628 10/13/2025|||

I understand why academia might be a racket. But why do you think they are actively hostile to technological progress? Are we including all the premier institutions in that claim?

Vektorceraptor 10/14/2025||

[flagged]

knowaveragejoe 10/15/2025||

The only people using the term NPC in this manner are, themselves, the real NPCs the term was devised to skewer

Vektorceraptor 10/17/2025||

If you can't take an insult - then you are an NPC

quantummagic 10/14/2025|

Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever.

Maybe if science depended on the average Joe actually having a living wage, enough to donate some directly to science, the incentive structures of our society would become more healthy than they currently are.

Rich people, worrying about rich people jobs and outcomes, is getting a little tiresome. We don't care about your women's studies "research" grants. Maybe something will actually be done about income inequality, if you want to save the things you actually care about. Until then, let it burn; a lot of us will barely notice the difference.

astrange 10/14/2025||

Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014. Wage inequality severely decreased between 2019 and 2023.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31010

Sometimes good things happen!

khafra 10/14/2025|||

> Then fund science. Just because the government has done it previously doesn't mean it always has to be like that forever.

I do. I'm not one of these wealthy startup founders, just a guy earning a salary--but I've donated to foundations doing basic research many times; and even to individual researchers when they lost a grant but were doing work that I wanted to see the results of.

However, funding science in general this way is likely to miss a lot of value. Not everyone makes basic research a priority in their charitable giving. More importantly, not everyone has my impeccable research taste: not to sound elitist, but if the average American's priorities determined the directions for basic research, we'd have thousands of studies on why vaccines cause autism, an nothing on weird stuff like the medical potential of gila monster saliva.

guywithahat 10/14/2025||

Not only that, but science was largely a privately-funded industry until a few decades ago, and many would argue governments do a bad job of funding science because a lot of nonsense gets wrapped up in it. It's frustrating because people will whole-heartedly claim science research needs more funding, and then hand the funding over to John Money so he can publish what happens when you sexually abuse children (spoiler: they committed suicide).

I don't think a lot of the people defending government backed research understand everything they're defending