In other words, academic research is a punt in the dark. Much of it will not yield all that much, but some of it will.

It is kind of similar to what YC and VC's do: give a little bit of funding to a small number of businesses, but hope a (very) small number will pay off big.

Academia is a small investment to a number of ideas, with the hopes of big pay-offs in a very small number. The technology behind the Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in the early nineties. You might not think that funding in high energy and particle physics would be worthwhile, but yet something completely different and revolutionary for all of humanity came out of it.

We just do not know where these revolutionary ideas come from, but what we do know is that they tend to come from some of the very brightest people.