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Comment by jayjay71 | Hacker News Reader

DARPA does a great job when they design competitions especially. Look at what they did for self-driving cars (they held all their competitions before Google or any company was putting any effort into it). A couple years later and suddenly it's a burgeoning field and now companies are being acquired. Their competition for humanoid robots likewise resulted in teams building real hardware on a deadline with impressive results.

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DARPA can be ahead of the curve. A few years ago, I met a VC that worked in the wireless sector. He seemed surprised to learn DARPA had been working on what I guess you'd now call whitespace technology back in the early 2000s. Industry interest came significantly later than that.

Though that can be a bad thing. You don't want to be in a position where your DARPA project ends but VCs aren't ready to look at you yet.

Strongly concur. In the mid-2000s, I was looking at a couple of collaborative filtering investments (in the days of RSS readers, the early mainstreaming of recommendation engines, etc.) and in doing some background / tech diligence, discovered that the entire thing had been done in the early 1980s at Xerox PARC.

That happened a couple of times during my first stint in VC in the mid-2000s -- ideas pioneered (and often reduced to practice) at PARC or other pure R&D facilities were finally finding mass-market or industry adoption.

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