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Comment by the_snooze | Hacker News Reader

DARPA is basically a state-sponsored VC that optimizes for completely different things. Instead of looking for 100x financial returns, they want technical advantages for the United States. The "moat" is the hardness of developing and operationalizing those technologies first.

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To be pedantic, In-q-tel is the literal state-sponsored VC.

DARPA is a step closer to traditional research labs but there is obviously some overlap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

> DARPA is a step closer to traditional research labs but there is obviously some overlap.

It's more like the NSF but focused on commercial grantees with project management thrown on top to orchestrate everything.

The really unique part is how much independence each program manager has and the term limits that prevent empire building.

DARPA's commercialization track record is decidedly mixed, so the VC comparison is unexpectedly apt :-)

(But yes: DARPA's mandate is explicitly to discover and develop the next generation of emerging technologies for military use.)

Decades ago, as my father explained to me, ARPA (no "D" at that time) was happy if 1% of their projects went all the way through to successful deployment. If they had a higher success rate it would mean they weren't aiming high enough.

> DARPA's commercialization track record is decidedly mixed...

If you count my number of attempts, sure.

If you count by impact, it's hard to come up with many things more impactful than the Internet...?

Yeah, I meant by number. But also: ARPA didn't commercialize the Internet! They explicitly refused to commercialize it; commercialization only happened after an Act of Congress induced interconnections between NSFNET and commercial networks.

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