Should we devote more to "critical innovation"?

• What is critical?

  • Atoms rather than bits?

    Innovating with atoms

  • But DTC (e.g. Casper, Haus) not critical

  • And some services critical: healthcare etc

  • Sectors? Time to Build, Founders Fund manifesto

• Confounding

  • Border cases: Google (framing as ad server vs framing as critical infra for knowledge workers)
  • Transition cases: games > GPUs > ML; Unity to speed up construction; WebGL used by SpaceX

  Toy projects can generate valuable outcomes

• Why do people care about the idea of frivolity?

  • Industrial sovereignty
  • Things that actually aren’t about innovation, just basic society functioning eg NIMBY/red tape on housing
  • Sense of justice around investment outcomes: Snap, HN "I could build that"
  • Sense of being lectured at: Clubhouse vs Time to Build

• What does it mean "we devote more"? Who is "we" and should they do?

  • A16Z advocacy vs actually investing themselves
    • VC is tiny; VC should pursue many fields
  • Is there evidence of fall-off in input investment in unarguably critical sectors? especially by government?

  Definite vs Indefinite Optimism