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Cool and awesome does not pay. The top companies may be using cool stuff to accomplish things, but the things being done are ultimately pedestrian. Google sells ads, Amazon runs an online marketplace, Apple makes personal communicators and Facebook is a place for chatting with friends. None of them are doing anything like "searching for the origins of the universe."

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Cool and awesome pays just fine. Ask NVIDIA. Many of the ideas pioneered in the Connection Machine have been validated by time. Hillis was only a couple of decades or so ahead of his time.

It doesn't pay when it is ahead of its time :)

I actually laughed hard at your last sentence. But you have made a very valid point.

One has to be pragmatic while establishing a company, especially in tech. The pitch shouldn't be something like - "Inventing a time travelling machine that that will reverse the entropy of the universe while self replicating von Neumann contructors"

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