Peter Thiel launches Breakout Labs to fund bold early-stage research | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel launches Breakout Labs to fund bold early-stage research

gigaom.com

87 pointspitdesi21 comments

Regardless of whether the amount is enough to fund scientific research endeavors (which range at > 250k/ year), Breakout Labs is a reflection of the current nature of scientific research.

The NIH or other foundations tend only to fund "safe" research proposals. Someone with a more radical idea with no funding resources is effectively shut down. 50k may not be enough to research something for a year, but it may be enough to prototype an idea. Win for creativity, win for science.

Are you speaking from experience, or from what you've heard?

I don't know much about NIH funding, but if you're looking for funding from (say) NSF, DOE or DARPA it doesn't have to be that "safe" except in the sense that they really want you to produce something publishable... not necessarily particularly useful. I figure that any worthwhile research project ought to be able to be massaged into a form where you're producing something worth publishing regardless of what happens.

NIH might be different, due to the larger and more expensive scale of these sorts of projects.

$50k to $300K grants seem awfully low for research projects. Heck you can barely build a good app with $50k.

This is what I was thinking. It's difficult to imagine the sort of scientific project which would simultaneously be:

a) Too early-stage for traditional funding agencies, and yet

b) Sufficiently small that you can make significant progress for $350K (let alone $50K!)

I'm not too well-versed in research funding, but NSF CAREER awards seem to be around twice that (i.e. $100k to $600k) for a few years of funding. I suppose the recipient would probably be getting funding from other sources as well?

As for building a good app, I don't know if I'd expect a what gets produced by a conventional research group to be a nicely polished, ready-to-deploy app. Grad students are probably somewhat cheaper than developers too.

Grad students are probably somewhat cheaper than developers too

Actually, the cost of funding a grad student is surprisingly large. If you're a professor with an external grant, then the first thing that happens is that the university takes some off the top (around 40%) which is supposed to pay for all the office space, admin staff, and so forth that you and your group get. Then you've gotta pay the tuition for the grad student on top of what you're paying them... meaning (so I hear) that it's no more expensive to hire a postdoc making $50K than a grad student making $25K. And of course the cost of a $50K postdoc is isn't $50K, it's close to $100K once all the random other costs are taken into account. So in the end, you need at least $100K in research funding for each grad student-year.

That's not entirely true at the places I've been and people I've talked to. The reason is because a lot of that overhead gets waived if the professor teaches. Usually one class/year = 1 grad student. That's why many grad students (PhD candidates) TA at first too, because unless they are really, really good, they aren't going to be worth it to give them an RA position, especially if they are taking classes and they can't be productive enough for a professor. In a large group, usually a few professors will teach, and the rest will supplement grad students with NSF or some other sort of grants.

The last NSF grant I helped with, done by a professor I worked for, was essentially for the grad student's salary they get to live off of, as the rest of the costs were waived by the school (in this case, 25k/year for 3 years)

This doesn't match my experiences for most major research universities with active research programs. It's very standard to fund students as researchers through their time in grad school (especially in bio, but in CS too) and it's also very common to charge ICR and the tuition waiver. (Which is usually something the grant has to pay for.)

Grad students are definitely cheaper than developers, but you're right that there's a lot of costs most people don't realize. At my institution, for instance, the cost of a grad student is a bit under $60k/yr to a bit over 65k/yr. Which compared to most salaries in our industry, is pretty cheap.

On our campus, our ICR rate is a bit over 50%, the grad student gets a stipend of around 27k/yr to 35k/yr and a bit over 15k to cover their fees.

Most of the UC campuses are going to look reasonably close to this number. Other universities have slightly different rate structures. I've heard ICR can go up to 70% at some private universities.

This is exactly why we need funding sources like Breakout Labs, to fund "science entrepreneurs and inventors" without the overhead of the university/grant system.

Imagine if half the money your web start-up raised paid for the salaries and buildings required to lecture to you about HTML/CSS and then test you on it, for secretaries to handle the paperwork required to beg for money, etc.

To add to this, the article mentions that "All types of scientific projects will be considered for support". There are some interesting things coming out of life sciences for example which at the moment may be too far out for VC investment. I wonder how many projects they intend to support at any one time.

This community also tends to have a software bias as well. Basic science often requires lots of high precision hardware which is not cheap.

Heck you can barely build a good app with $50k.

huh? yea if you hire 10 shitty developers... i know plenty of people that have had revenues of 200k-1.5m with budgets far closer to zero than 50k. Yes, excellent people are involved, but if you can barely build 'a good app' for 50k, you really need to rethink your strategy.

I hope this style of funding takes off. I'll be the first to admit that I buy into the hype around social, mobile, realtime, and all those buzzwords for consumer apps but the future I dream about involves taking on the bigger challenges, basically the ones outlined in the Grand Challenges for Engineering: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

I hope so too! Thiel definitely seems like the most visionary of the billionaires in the world, he probably will end up having a greater positive impact than anyone else on the Forbes list.

Ideally, they would be a hub for innovative researchers on a shoestring-budget that could end up working together on even more ambitious projects. Or a good leader might be able to recruit from the applicant pool to break up a larger project into small groups that could focus on specific parts of the research.

Anyone know what % royalties they are asking for?

Hm, and just a few weeks ago Thiel was predicting the "end of the future": http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/278758/end-future-pet...

Bipolar much?

Did you actually read the article you linked? The article and the fund are quite consistent.

Thiel argues that the economic growth and tech breakthroughs of the past few decades are being taken for granted, that not enough people are taking on the ambitious projects needed to realize a future that we all assume is coming.

This initiative is him putting money behind his words.

The articles fit exactly.

Most investments these days (even from the govt) are in short-term quick-to-realize projects. If this continues, we'll have endless electronic social playtoys, living as grown-up children in walled gardens, but the 'grand future' would be gone. No spaceflight, no radical new techniques, no new frontiers.

That's why people that are rich and interested in longer-term research, like him, could start a fund to fund more radical and long-term research proposals. Something that was originally the scope of university research, but times change.

I'm all for billionaires using their money to fund research, but that NRO article was so bad that I question his judgement.

1) I don't know what tech slowdown he's talking about. The cost of genome sequencing is falling at faster-than-Moore's law rates; that's probably the most significant growth area right now.

2) Thiel is a Singulatarian [3]; I thought the point of that was that exponential growth is inevitable. It's that coupled with this article that leads me to dub him bipolar. If you believe in the Singularity I presume you believe it will happen with or without any particular pool of money.

3) This paragraph. Maybe sounding like Grampa Simpson is required to get into NRO. And who in their right mind considers Robert Moses and Brasilia good models for anything?

> "towards the end Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost."

Damn hippies! And here I heard that they helped invent personal computing [1] and saved physics [2].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Pers... [2] http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/ [3] http://singularityu.org/?p=1749

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