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Notes -
Funny you mention that:
courtlistener here.
The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level.
UC, as a specific example, gets several billion, as in starting with a B dollars in federal funding per year for research alone. When UC throws money at a complete scam, or has its staff or students commit overt fraud, these are genuinely nutpicks.
By contrast, Peter Thiel could, if he liquidated his entire fortune, do that perhaps for four years. Not, you know, in reality, but if we replace economics with a frictionless spherical cow, it's kinda close.
In the real world, his foundation gives out less than five million per year, and I don't say that as a criticism. I couldn't quickly find out his stake in Substrate, the chip scam you mention, but it's probably not a large portion of the 100m USD that Substrate has been dick-waving as its seed fund. This is Thiel's Solyndra, perhaps! (Wasn't Solyndra 500m+ USD in government-supported loans?) This is Thiel's A123 Systems!
Actually, it's worse than even that: a lot of the evaluation protocols have been absolutely braincored themselves. I can't give the full rant without self-doxxing, but suffice it to say actually interesting with these groups seriously will turn your stomach.
So the real answer is that a successful buyer must have a solution to reliably cut through all of this mess and evaluate decisions several orders of magnitude more reliably than government funding, or a successful seller have so clear a product and vision - and marketing capabilities and acceptable presentation and everything else - as to resolve all of those issues for them.
Otherwise, it's a game of dice.
I guess, but in a world of technology, even a tiny amount of empowered talent can compete with an ocean of well-funded incompetence. Telegram famously has like 30 employees, and it's one of the largest social platforms on the planet.
Regarding Thiel & co, it's honestly kinda baffling to me how much worse they've gotten with selecting people to fund in recent years. They used to be much better at identifying talent. Take Vitalik Buterin. We can debate whether Ethereum is a scam or not, but it is certainly extremely successful, and Vitalik himself is not a grifter: he is very gifted technically. He has good knowledge of cryptography, and has written extensively on it.
Similarly, take this recent tweet by Paul Graham. I agree with him, but it's a frankly baffling admission: are you seriously conceding that none of the people in charge of distributing large amounts of money know anything about how technology actually works? You don't think, maybe, you could get some actual electrical engineers and high-tier software developers on your staff instead of a bunch of socialites and wordcels? It legit boggles my mind.
Then again, the website I'm typing this on barely loads half of the time I try to visit, so apparently running a small forum requires S-tier talent these days.
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