Le Chaud Lapin (never seen that movie ...): I can't see your posts because of a googlemail block so I can only respond after some else does, like Robert in this case. Sorry, got no choice here until Google cleans up their act, meaning all the spam.
60? Wow! I didn't need this many. Maybe half a dozen a year, if that. But they do require a big chunk of unpaid work hours.
Often they do not understand the technology very well. I have spent lots and lots of time with fund managers. Only after knowing them for a while did they break the ice. "Hey, could we skulk off and then you could explain to me how this really works?" ... "Sure". One has got to learn how to ratchet tech-talk down to a level that bankers can understand.
ROFL! They must have been really naive.
Amazing. I've never had that happen. But my experience is that ideas are better lodged with corporations that are familiar with not just the market but also the technology. They see through any sort of proposed technology in milliseconds, provided their senior managers are worth their salt. BTDT, also on the other side of the table, the due diligence side.
Not with me. Then I will politely cut them loose in due course.
Only 10%? That's pretty generous of you.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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I was not complaining; I was criticizing. You stated that something was a close approximation to something else. This is an objective assertion, not a description of anecdotal evidence. To protect yourself you are now stating that you meant something other than what you wrote, and you are getting stroppy. Your evidence for your assertions necessarily constitutes a very small sample. Were you a thinking person, you would take this into account, and present your observations as anecdotal at best. But this is not what you did.
IF the whole plan pans out, and that's usually a big "if". I have heard from Japanese VCs that on average one out of ten make it. The other nine just burn through an awful lot of cash and then fizzle.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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There is a popular story in the UK, that I am ~assured~ is not made up: a British civil servant was talking to his US counterpart about their respective [academic] research funding strategies. The US chap said that typically around 10% of the allocation converted into successful products, innovations, etc. The British chap said "Ah yes, interesting; in the UK we just fund the 10%".
This gets back to the whole random-vs-deterministic debate, and is rooted in a kind of class struggle among investors and entrepreneurs.
People who are inept at choosing the right horses would have you beleive that winning is random. People who are adept at choosing the right horses would have you believe that winning is deterministic. In between is a spectrum of ability to choose the right horses.
I had the conversation with a VC in New York City this past January who had invested $5US million in a company doing IPTV. The company was stuggling badly, near bankruptcy, and I had learned of it through one of my ex-students who introduced them to me for a consulting project that they wanted completed. It was difficult trying to figure out what they wanted, because the person in charge of the project could barely tell me what he wanted. He was polite, professionally, but frighteningly ignorant. It took about 12 emails back and forth to realize that the reasson I was having so much trouble understanding him was because he did not understand himself. When I finally realized what the other all goal was, It took all of 5 minutes of poking around to realize that:
With the exception of my ex-student and another engineer, the technical depth within the company was too low for them to be doing what it was they are doing [data compression - they had stolen a compressor from another company, essentially].
someone in company had grossly distorted the truth about capability of product (flat out lied in fact) to customers.
The VC who invested the million didn't have a clue.
The CTO of the company had recently spent 35 months in Federal prison for burning down his own computer store. He was convicted on certain evidence:
a. being seeing on camera running from the store holding a gas can a few seconds before the store went up in flames b. reeking of gasoline at the hospital where he was treated for 2nd degree burns over his body (he didn't run fast enough) c. his own employee's testimony that, the day before the fire, employee was told to "get anything of value you own out of the store by midnight tonight."
Anyhow, I was introduced to this VC for potential investment. As mentioned, he understood very little about IPTV, let alone network protocol stacks. It was obvious that I would get no traction with him, so I asked him about the IPTV company, and the the word he used to describe the investment was "problematic". It took the opportunity to poke him a bit, to try to figure out what goes through the mind of a VC when he writes a check for $5 million for an ex-asonists who claims to have technology that, if it existed, would violate several fundamental laws of information theory, not to mention was just plain dumb to any engineer worth his salt in the field.
The VC starts up with the, "well...you can never tell with these things...it's all random......the technology looked good...the guy could sell snow to Eskimos!!!"
I disagreed and asked him if he understood the technology, and he got angry and that was the end of that.
The point is that it's not entirely random. Just ask Andy Bechtolsheim about his $100,000US investment in Google and other investments:
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It is more random for some VC's than others. Having worked for a few startups, I can tell that most ideas, IMO, are mediocre at best (copy cat, limited market, etc.).
Products like the Rubik's Cube, OTHO, were so compelling...not only was the marketing initially bad, it was non-existent, and the product still fared well.
The Norwegian attitude is that "we are such good friends with the people behind the 10% that we get their results for free."
I have heard this 'research by parasittism' be stated as de facto policy in several institustions. The rationale is that "we are too small and have too few funds, so we can't be best. So we make sure we stay close to those who are." One of my former colleagues told me he had presented himself as an employee at whatever institution to somebody. "What a pity - you people used to be good" was the response.
You only have to talk with managers are intermediate and higher levels to get this attitude confirmed. Maybe after a few drinks. Don't repeat my mistake - I talked with these guys only after I signed the contract.
I do believe that you misunderstood me. Some other poster discussed one incident, i remarked that matched fairly nicely with a basketful of my own experiences. Now you complain that i am generalizing from one incident, which i did not do. I do think you are obfuscating, as i found no basis disbelieve the evidence of my own several experiences.
Hmmm..forgive me, but does not "anecdotal" mean or imply stories from others? What was presented was an account by the person that was *directly* involved...
Seems that VC deserved to lose! Most definitely, better products will do better in the marketplace - but that liar and thief gave one proof that good salesmanship can turn a sow's ear into silk.. Now the prime question is: is there such a thing as an honest and honorable salesman? If so, hire him - yesterday!
Of course it is (but not according to civil servants, it would seem), but it depicts the situation we all experience here - the more than slightly iffy (ignorant) attitude of government towards research generally (especially generic research that may not have an immediately obvious commercial application but (shock, horror) increases knowledge); the near impossibility of getting any research funding; but most particularly the requirement to describe the results of the research at the application stage. They don't want research (because some of it may fail), they want product development. It has to be fashionable, and it has to be understandable by lay people.
I actually got a research officer job for a year (the maximum period allowed for), through a grant on the AHRC** "speculative scheme" (it goes in under a colleague's name, to employ me - the only way I can do it as an "independent"). That is, it was expressly for projects where the outcome was (relatively) uncertain. The project was classified "A+ priority funding", and they even asked if they could use the application to train assessors. The project was more successful than anticipated (our Sliding Phase Vocoder work, including a new frequency-domain FM-based effect).
So we put in for a follow-up grant for three years, to "do it properly", work on the HPC aspects to have it run in real time etc, develop a ConstantQ version, fund a PhD studentship etc. We got a lot of help from a hardware company in Bristol (some temporary income for me, kit for the Uni), so there was no question regarding "industry relevance".
The application was rejected as "not a priority area". Some issues of concern were cited in the rejection letter, namely (I quote verbatim) "will the source code be made available as text?", followed by "will there be a readme file?" (we publish all our work open-source - it is all in Csound already). Now anyone putting in an application for funding must be prepared for rejection (I have got very used to it); but I would have hoped for better reasons than that, especially after the previous pat on the back.
To make such a follow-up project start at the end of the funded year without a break, we would have had to submit the proposal barely two months after the start of that project - i.e. well before we would be in a position to cite previous results, formulate goals, methodologies, etc. With a turn-around time like that, plus the attrition rate for applications, it is impossible to form any long-term plans for research in a department.
So ~sometimes~ a little money is forthcoming, but there is no sense of the need to follow-up, establish anything medium to long-term. In a way, they money I did get was wasted, since I have had no means to develop the work further. It all seems to be on the whim of whoever is evaluating proposals at the time. If they are scientists but know little about music and audio we are stuffed; if they are musicians but understand nothing of computing, we are stuffed again.
So yes, it is a nice joke - gallows humour. A government that only funds
10% of what they should do (given their stated ambitions) is not taking research (or researchers) seriously.
Sorry Tallywhacker, it is you demonstrating the stooopidity! Like most scientists and engineers you haven't the least political clue!
DARPA works like this: It is NOT as everyone supposes an agency dedicated to furthering research and the improvement of the world or even of military applications. That is merely a cover and secondary effect, which if it happens is OK and if it doesn't makes no difference to the fundamentals of the organization. To think that it's all about science and development is naive beyond believe.
Here the rule gents: "When a set of logical circumstances comes to an Illogical conclusion, you can be SURE politics is involved.
DARPA and it's sister orgs all over the world are POLITICAL organizations. Hence the primary focus is political. Which raises the questions why would anyone EXPECT such an organization to be strongly supporting new work simply because it is innovative and will revolutionize and greatly improve some field of endeavor? Such an expectation is nonsense.
The true goals of DARPA and places like it are political. They include things like the bureaucrat "prime directive" [cover your ass!], the support of your "friends", the crushing of your "enemies", the distribution of large sums of money to create political control such as to large numbers of graduate students which acts on the one hand as a scholarship on the way to graduation keeping them dependent upon the hand-outs and on the other as a method of keeping them confined to "safe" research areas where they won't cause you trouble. And secondarily, funding the students also provides control of their professors as well through the "publish or perish" policies. The same rules also apply to companies with new ideas as well. The goal there is obviously also political which means that the effort has to be made to force all new ideas through the large corporations so that they can be controlled.
The political situation DARPA certainly does NOT want is a bunch of students of tenured professors out doing research on their own, on god knows what, that might have a major political impact on society or a bunch of brilliant start-up companies revolutionizing their fields where the large established "friends" can't keep them under "control". Control, buster, it's ALL about control!
The reason you are all confused and bitching about how "dumb" DARPA is, would be because you have totally misunderstood what they do! You have bought into some totally false song and dance about "supporting research" and beginning with a false premise you obviously can't make sense of their behavior.
So let me assure you that if you are a genius with a grand idea that could revolutionize this or that, the LAST thing DARPA wants to see is for you to succeed at doing so! I can assure you that IF your idea actually had serious merit, they would WITHDRAW funding because from a military standpoint, the optimum place to develop such ideas is in secret INSIDE the military. DARPA only acts as an idea generator for the REAL research which will go on elsewhere. [inside the large corps or govt. labs we called "friends"]
Put it all together and DARPA's seemingly "insane" actions make perfect sense. The problem is not DARPA. It is quite effective at what it really intends to do. The problem is Geek-types with ZERO understanding of how politics work, and even less interest in getting involved in politics, who only want to use their intelligence and skills to improve the world. Sorry, such high-toned ideals sound great, but will get you nowhere in a real world where predatory men (and women) constantly seek power over others. In short. The problem is you.
Basically correct. However, if you are really working on the cutting edge for example in medical the determinism coefficient is miniscule. You simply can't know if a certain procedure will work. Nobody can. Else one of the big pharmaceutical or devices corporations would already have put it onto the shelves at Long's Drugs.
That is a classical mistake. I will never understand this but VCs and corporations are willing to spend six figures per case on legal counsel but they balk at retaining a few engineering consultants for less money to check things over. Naturally, that leads to tons of failed investments. The worst one I've witnessed: I wrote a proposal to a struggling VC-funded firm about how I and a FPGA/CPLD engineer could help them pull through. This is because I saw quite clearly where they were heading down the wrong path and how we could fix things. They pondered it and then turned us down. Subsequently the whole business went belly-up. And I knew it would :-(
Oh man, they didn't even do a criminal background check before investing big money? Now that's pretty daft. What would that have cost? $100? $200?
The ones I was actively involved in as engineer all took off. So far ...
But I also never participate in anything I do not believe in.
Actually yes, there are, but in an area most people do not know: Christian businesses. For example I have retirement money tied up in an organization called Church Extension Fund. No hard selling going on, just plain old-fashioned financial advice. FDIC protected? Nope. Does that bother me? Nope.
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Regards, Joerg
http://www.analogconsultants.com/
"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.
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