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Comment by FiatLuxDave | Hacker News Reader

So, what is an inventor to do? It sounds like you are in a similar boat to the one I am in, with a math-software based invention (mine is field crossing between telecommunications and super-resolution mathematics), for which it is hard to get attention in this day of cat-video apps and labor cost arbitrageurs. Twenty years ago I found Steve Jurvetson, who is one of those rare VCs who can actually do technical review. But unfortunately he is now too successful to evaluate out-of-the-blue opportunities,and finding the next one like him is probably going to take just as long as it took me to find him. Likely longer, since last time I was looking was not at a bubble peak with all its attendant noise and wannabes.

Where do you look for funding for actual revolutionary technology, or are you just as frustrated as I am?

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What are you looking for funding for, a sales team? I watched your video, interesting stuff.

Have you done consulting to see how well 20fold works in practice yet?

Yes, and also for further development work to make the product fit better into cell towers and phones. Basically, funding would make the same growth process go a lot faster than doing it in my spare time with my own wallet, and patents have a limited lifetime. So far, the main interest has been from ham radio and satellite comm folks, but we know that cell phones are where the real money is at. We really need contacts in the mobile phone infrastructure industry, more than anything.

B2B infrastructure is a hard area in which to run a bootstrap startup. I'm not really sure how to fit 20fold into a consultant mold. I am interested if anyone has any advice on how to do this, though.

Telecoms are notoriously difficult to market to. Actually I wouldn't mind discussing this with you further, my email is on my profile page for the time being if you'd like to get in touch.

I didn't start with the math I derived. E.g., there's a lot of math I could derive that I couldn't turn into business. So, to derive new math, I want that math to be powerful and valuable for a new business.

So, I started with the business idea, the really short, simple one from 50,000+ feet up. Right, John Doerr, that idea by itself is worthless.

I'd like to say that I did the planning for the math next, then the business model, then the user interface/user experience (UI/UX), then the computing, all in some such order, but no such thing would be correct.

Instead I did a fitting, did the planning of the whole by planning all the pieces so that they all fit together; e.g., the math fits because it is the crucial core, enabling technology that lets the rest work and the whole be valuable.

Or, I don't want to do research without good plans for a happy trip to the bank.

I derived some math, but I'm not trying to be a math researcher. I wrote some software, but I'm not trying to be a programmer. Instead, I'm trying to be a businessman, that is, to make money, the green kind, and there the math, computing, Moore's law, the infrastructure software, the Internet, mobile, the software I wrote, etc. are all business advantages, that is, make my chances of getting rich better than, say, running a pizza shop, being a math prof, or being a programmer.

But there was another criterion: I needed to bring my project to nice profitability just from my checkbook where I did all the work.

It was in that context that I derived the math and wrote the code.

If you have some good technical work, then maybe you'd like to turn it into a business. To do that, it can help if you can do all the work to good profitability alone funded just by your own checkbook. And it is crucial that the technology can help you get to the necessary happy users/customers.

A model is the guy who did the Canadian romantic matchmaking service Plenty of Fish. He was long just one guy, two old Dell servers, ads just via Google, and $10 million in annual revenue. He grew, hired a staff, and recently sold for $575 million in cash. Maybe for his matchmaking he had some clever ideas -- maybe.

Some good, new technology can be a big advantage, maybe even crucial. But really you need a feasible path all the way to "The Pay Window".

From a background in high end work in the STEM fields, it's easy to guess that, when some high end STEM field work has some new results that clearly should be the crucial, core of a valuable new business, there is some funding for that. In a word, nope. Exception: Some guy with a lot of background in fusion has a plan where as little as $500 million equity might get to a prototype fusion reactor that generates energy, and get one on one with a dozen or so billionaires who will pull out their personal checkbooks. Otherwise, essentially nope.

VC? Sure, if look at their Web sites, can get the idea that they fund ambitious, change the world, brilliant, new, disruptive, ideas. Yup, and they also fund tall, short, thin, and fat people, too. But the reason they fund is to follow making money their way which is to buy, on terms onerous for the founders, a fraction of a business with traction significant and growing rapidly. That's what they do. Maybe their LPs make sure that that is exactly what they do, no more and no less, and no funding off the back of a napkin. In particular, it appears that almost universally VCs just will not fund software development. Instead, they want the software running and in use, with significant traction growing rapidly. As IIRC Sam Altman put it recently, VC funding is to let a growing business grow faster. Bringing good, powerful new STEM field research to market? Nope.

The idea that good technical work is valuable, etc. seems to come heavily from the massive funding of research for US national security of the past 75 years, some from the best work of Bell Labs, a little from Xerox PARC, and a lot from NIH.

Sure, I didn't pay even a dime tuition for my Master's or Ph.D. So, where'd the money come from? Sure, Congress via NSF, etc. And what was Congress thinking? Sure, the bomb, the hydrogen bomb:

"Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb. The Bomb, Dmitri, the hydrogen bomb."

and Sosus, passive sonar, much better jet engines, the submarines, GPS, the fighter and bomber airplanes, the high end radar and infrared systems, etc. It's a big system with layers -- the STEM fields of the research universities, the DoD laboratories, the Federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), the large aerospace companies, etc. And while that funding is definitely what built Silicon Valley, now Sand Hill Road is more interested in some clever, novel, viral, social, local, mobile, photo/video, private, in-group, sharing app. Or at least that is what they think.

The good news is the computing, storage, processing, data volumes, data rates, OS software, etc. that $1000 can buy. So, that can be a heck of an advantage. Heck, of you could have a robot mow a 1/2 acre lawn for $2, then you could make a big splash in the grass mowing business. Well, now there's a lot of data, and if can think of something valuable to do with it, then maybe can make a big splash, and fortune, in computing. Some good, new research in the STEM fields can be a big advantage.

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