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As a side note, do you think academia or startups are leading the charge in revolutionary technologies? As a post-grad, my point of view was firmly skewed towards academia, but the pace of iterative technological improvements by startups makes it seem as if in the short term, startups are driving new technologies more than academic research.

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A lot of startup founders are people who leave academia for one reason or another (graduates, ex-academics).

Also, a lot of excellent ideas (e.g. the Web) were of almost no interest to academic researchers in relevant fields at the time - they dismissed it as a toy. And perhaps from a purely academic viewpoint they were right - but that doesn't mean that it isn't of use to billions of people.

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