Silicon Valley VCs don't want Obama's money, think Google is passe | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley VCs don't want Obama's money, think Google is passe

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12 pointspeter1235 comments

8. Health care administration will be the fastest-growing sector. (The panelists were so bored by this trend they didn't even discuss it.)

Warning Bells

Information technology venture capitalists didn't "want" to discuss "the fastest-growing sector" which constitutes the transmission, storage, and processing of structured information?

Sadly, health care is so strongly regulated that starting up in that sector might be more of a legal challenge than a technical challenge.

With this administration, the very parameters of the market are within question. How much will be taken over by the government? Who wants to sell to the government?

Yes. There was an Economist article related to this, about progress in health care in India that wouldn't really be possible in Western countries: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13496367

Health care isn't just about making new treatments possible; it's also about making existing treatments efficient and inexpensive.

* While acknowledging that the administration's heart is in the right place, he pointed out that traditionally, direct investment in technology by governments doesn't work out well. He said the United State's subsidies on ethanol, France's decision to skip the Internet in favor of the state-sponsored Minitel, and Japan's direct investment in supercomputers as it tried to spend its way out of a recession were examples of poor investments. *

I'd be willing to say that VC's aren't really interested in government funded research because it actively competes with them.

I've been thinking about the roll of government funded research for a while, and I've been amazed at how much science is advanced by military and government funding. Take the tour at the Computer History Museum. I doubt that computing history would have been the same without massive government funding of Colossus and ENIAC. Where would the internet be without ARPANET?

Where would nuclear energy be without the Manhattan project? Where would chemical science be without the huge funding in World War I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_funding_of_science

Would our understanding of technologies like radar and sonar be the same without government funding? Would the semi-conductor industry be the same without government investment at it's inception? Certainly NASA has developed a few good technologies.

VC's are the best predictors of irrational investment ideas.

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