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Comment by smokel | Hacker News Reader

> If your business does not have university affiliations with people that get existing grants, or connections to EU bureaucracy, then you can forget about getting a dime.

So, then simply get in contact with your local university. It helps the university to get grants when commercial parties are involved, so this is a win-win.

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Hah!

I studied at an excellent Dutch university that's an EU funding darling and had plenty of connections. But because I had "just" a bachelor's degree from a top university, plus substantial relevant experience, nobody would take me seriously. Even with a master's, you will find most people think you are unserious in most "hard" fields. You often need a PhD. And then God help you if you choose to leave the existing ossified structures of academia and industry.

And then you still run up against the issues of risk tolerance (which is zero) and long timelines.

Look, the stated goal of this program is to compete with American venture capital, right? Then look at the founders who got American venture capital money. Look at how many don't even have a bachelor's! Count the number that participated in traditional structures of academia and grant-receiving corporations. Virtually none of those people would have ever gotten a dime of this money, let alone an offer to collaborate from a university.

A lot of founders are uni dropouts in America because the money flows easily and you dont have to study in university to have skills.

Its quite a stupid idea that only the most educated people can get these grants because people who excel at academia might not make it in the world of business.

Why such a crippling policy? Like you said, many successful entrepreneurs are university dropouts. For research grants, sure, go to PhDs. But if you want a tech industry, you need to cast a much wider net than that.

Although there's also NLNet that hands out open source subsidies from the EU. That might be more accessible, although I also get the impression that the money is a lot less. I don't have any experience with it, though.

The American DoD is a bit like this. It is much easier to get R&D contracts if you have PhD next to your name.

I don't know what price you'd pay in your hypothetical scenario, but I would say that European universities often take a larger chunk of equity than US unis where spinouts are concerned [1]. Most US universities take between 0-5% equity, where EU could go to 10%, and UK unis up to 20-30%.

[1] https://www.spinout.fyi/data

If we're talking about existing EU funding mechanisms, the participating universities take no equity in their startup partners whatsoever, they just get paid part of the funding pot to do a bit of related research and publish it, and might be able to generate a bit of their own IP

Dutch universities go for up to 25%, just for the IP rights [1]. With seed funding etc it often goes up to 30-35%.

[1] Dutch Universities spin-off terms: https://www.delftenterprises.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/D...

the feeling that they needed to include a few paragraphs of “look this isn’t the single digit amounts your friends are getting… but… it’s dilutive and we know best for you” language is telling

Exactly. A lot of academics fall for it, thinking these are normal amounts. Then later when they try to raise money they often get into trouble as no invester in their right mind wang to touch them. Having a university as a major share holder with voting seats isn't a great idea!

When I did that university's cut was 30 to 50% of shares at a top Durch university.

Ha! You must have never dealt with European universities.

Yeah this, in fact forget local and just write to researchers in your field, or go through dedicated network events. Finding a university researcher with a common interest in a field who'd consider the opportunity to be subsidised for the next 3-4 years working on stuff they're interested in isn't the hardest hurdle deeptech startups will face on their road to commercialization, especially when the alternative people treat like it's some kind of meritocratic sieve is "get warm intros to a VC class so insular some of them write unironic LinkedIn posts about how it's impossible to be successful outside the Bay Area"

(Or just use one of the funding mechanisms that attach little or zero weight to academic collaboration)

Ha! Downvotes for pointing out that if you actually need them, university researchers are actually more willing to chat about getting research funding than VCs are to give the average first time founder money. Never change, HN!

Honestly, I'd love it if the mail in my inbox from universities wanting to do European projects with us was the result of me being some sort of uniquely-valuable well-connected wizard whereas all the founders had to do was flutter their eyelashes and say "Founders Fund are following on" to get term sheets from everyone in the Valley. But that's not the reality...

In reality there's no shortage of bureaucracy and credentialism if you want Federal contracts (and in some industries plenty of bureaucracy just to do your research in the US even if you don't take any money), and the US exceptionalism when it comes to mindset and regulatory looseness is pretty much the same in the backwater states that don't have any notable startups of their own, whilst Bavaria doesn't seem to be doing too badly for VC investment compared with anywhere that's not California despite the extremes of German bureaucracy. And fundamentally VCs and government funders on both sides of the Atlantic are doing different jobs, with different investment targets and different tradeoffs for founders.

There are clearly some frustrated voices in this thread. I try not to take the downvotes personally.

I hope to eventually learn how to engage more constructively with such responses. When someone claims to understand how a system works, yet behaves in a way that contradicts that understanding and then blames the system for not meeting their expectations, I question whether their insight is as deep as they suggest.

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