Interesting that NFX posts always get showcased in HN in front page.Plus, any top comments on other posts also link to NFX website. Guess there is a big pro NFX lobby lurking in HN.
I have the same problem and am struggling mightily with it daily. OP, I would love to correspond more with you. Can you please reach me through my email that is in the profile. Perhaps we can exchange tips and I can learn from you.
Great. After flogging for 10 years that software is eating the world and that hard sciences and physical world doesn't matter, a16z now is asking us to build? Color me surprised.
Very good question. I've been thinking about this for awhile. This is fairly common on the PE industry but I'm not aware of this happening in VC / startup world. OP, can you please post the links of websites that you mention list the SaaS companies please?
20 years ago, when I was a bright eyed graduate student, I was mesmerized by MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems), which promised similar revolution. I learnt about 'artificial muscles', and MIT Technology Review even ran a cover issue on how MEMS will revolutionize everything. This article could have been written in the year 2000 except it would have mentioned MEMS then. Now there is no mention of it. I'm older and saner now. Still feels very much a academic pipe dream than real engineering. I dreamed of working with Kris Pister and now he is 20 years older. Another young professor at UPenn and Cornell is trying to get tenure....call me cynical but this too shall pass. Issues of toxicity in human body etc are huge...
MEMS have been much quieter in their influence as it turns out. Now they're in everything with an IMU or accelerometer, especially including things like your phone; they're in disposable pressure sensors; and they're in microphones[1].
They've revolutionized some parts of how we live our daily lives, though not in the same way innovations like the car, airplane, computer, or cellphone have.
I expect microbots will be similar. After a decade or two of hard work and billions of dollars invested, they will quietly revolutionize some other small parts of our lives. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moves on.
MEMS is also used for laser beam steering (depth sensors, projectors), oscillators and even loudspeakers. MEMS is truly a breakthrough where physics meet electronics.
Commercially MEMS is also very interesting because it’s a branch of semiconductor manufacturing which is dominated by different players compared to the regular TSMC/Samsung/Intel trifecta.
Being wrong is one thing, being too early is an entirely different matter. The timescales of these types of innovations are very long. Early failures don't always mean it's a bad idea.
The only foolish part of your story is over-investing (and over-selling to the media/public) too early before you have any tangible results.
For me enabling cheap accelerometers so it's fairly trivial to give our machines sense of 'up' and movement is a sufficient enabled advancement for any hyped up technology.
Ah, where do I start. Two of my close relatives have schizophrenia, people whom I’ve known since they were born. They were both diagnosed around 19 and are now 29. In the last ten years we’ve tried many medications, hospitalizations, with little to no avail. I never understood the word curse when I was a kid. I read about it in stories and I had seen people curse each other. Living with schizophrenia is the definition of a curse. Lives wasted in an alternate reality. The lives of the care givers and family impacted terribly.
