I’m long overdue in giving you all an update on the BBN Fund. In short: progress is strong. For those who haven’t been following along, BBNs are R&D organizations that pursue an ambitious, North Star technical vision, funded by a mix of contracts and grants. Think interactive computing in the late 1950s, autonomous vehicles in the 1980s, or driving the cost of proteins down to 1/1000th the cost of what it is today. If it sounds hard to (a) find researcher-founders talented enough to do such work, and (b) find customers or funders with the technical ambition to fund such big swings, it can be. But over the past 20 months, the young and growing BBN community has proven that they can make it happen on a pretty reliable basis.
A more robust update will follow in a future piece, but below are a few highlights:
The UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) has doubled our cohort size for the BBN launchpad partnership this coming year, enabling our program to support eight ARIA-relevant BBNs and deploy £800k+ across the cohort. According to public data, BBNs in the ARIA ecosystem have already brought in ~$20–$30 million in aligned, ambitious contracts. This is up from ~$10 million earlier this year, when Janelle Tam and I launched the BBN Fund.
Coefficient Giving has generously given us a $700k grant to continue to find ways to build more BBNs in the modern era.1 This grant marks the first time we can directly fund non-ARIA BBNs, while also covering general operating costs. As discussed in our piece announcing the BBN Fund, we intend to stretch this money exceptionally far through a combination of revenue-sharing agreements, low-interest loans, and grants. We expect that every dollar spent by the fund — whether on our salaries or deployed directly to BBNs — will help bring in ~10X the amount spent in contracts and grants. That’s been true of our work so far.
Help Wanted: Technical Scouts
We’ve been doing all of this with an obvious bottleneck: we lack a team of scientific scouts. I have a cadre of world-class, creative technical people I go to for advice (Niko McCarty, Adam Marblestone, ARIA program directors, Ales Flidr, etc.), and I’m helpful in my own way — I understand BBN founders’ technical visions, have some useful contract ideas, and am serviceable at making connections in certain areas — but I’m an org structures guy, not a true scientist or engineer. I’m looking for technical scouts with the strange and wonderful spark that will take us to the next level.2
The task is, in a nutshell:
Find modern J.C.R. Lickliders who, under the right circumstances, could found BBNs as impactful as the one that built the ARPAnet
Find ambitious, aligned funders and customers who can enable the work
In any area where you have both, if you connect those two dots, we have a BBN. Connect five pairs of dots a year, and that’s a pretty fantastic year. Connect ten, and you might be on the way to becoming one of the most important people in the R&D community. I will continue to do everything I can to connect dots myself, but I’d like to become Plan B.
To do this job, I’m looking for technical obsessives. Specifically, people who:
Fiendishly keep up with relatively broad chunks of the academic literature
Find it fun to befriend as many up-and-coming, applied, ambitious scientists as they can
Know who is up to what, from R&D funders to academic labs
Have a crystal-clear sense of what types of work academic labs and VC-funded startups do and don’t do, and have a clear sense of where their work is insufficient
Have brains for practical organizational details — philanthropic funding processes, how biotech contract staging works, the rudiments of equipment procurement, etc.
Essentially, I’m looking for somebody who already does most of what this job entails for the love of the game.
We just raised money from Fulcrum Science to seed our technical scouting capacity. We are open to solving the scouting problem with one full-timer or several part-timers. I’m flexible on the type of person and how we structure the arrangement. Proposed time commitments could range from two hours a month to full-time. A conviction I’ve developed while obsessing over the history and modern practicalities of building great things in the cracks of the R&D ecosystem is that many great technical minds are underemployed. Some people have exceptional technical knowledge, but don’t care to make individual projects their monomaniacal obsession, as academics often must. They might not want to manage people, as deep tech CEOs must. They might find the shape of projects that come through the doors of VC firms a bit technically dull. What I need is for you to be obsessed with finding modern-day Lickliders and the people who might fund them.
If our interests are aligned, I’d like to unleash you. The work arrangement can be shaped to fit the person applying. Excellence at the job at hand is the only thing I will be uncompromising on.
Interested?
If this sounds like you, email me (gilliam@renphil.org) with your takes on:
Technical areas which could house phenomenal BBNs
Potential customers or funders that might be ideal funding sources for those BBNs
Specific individuals well-suited to founding these orgs3
And feel free to ask me any questions, too.
The original BBN’s founders — Bolt & Beranek, MIT professors — took pride in “only making hires that raised the average competence level of the firm.” This approach brought them great minds like John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and a young Fisher Black (of Black-Scholes fame) as part-time firm collaborators. And it brought them J.C.R. Licklider as a full-timer, who built out the firm’s computing efforts from scratch. They understood that to build something like a technology-maximizing firm, nothing was more valuable than practical individuals with the “strange and wonderful creative spark that makes a good researcher.” When the firm found that in a person, they went out of their way to build something together.
I look forward to hearing from some of you.
All the best,
Eric
I look forward to hearing from those of you who reach out. And if this is your first exposure to this work, which I’m so romantic about, the grand project of enabling modern-day J.C.R. Lickliders to build their life’s work within BBN-like orgs, rather than shoehorning their best ideas into VC-shaped boxes, welcome:) I encourage you to check out any of the pieces below, and send me the best ideas and people that come to mind as you read.
Ideas for Biotechnology BBNs — Niko McCarty
BBNs Toward Universal Fabricators — Ivan Jayapurna
An Applied Crop Genetics BBN — Karen Sarkisyan
“The Third University of Cambridge”: BBN and the Development of the ARPAnet
An Interview with Chuck Thorpe on CMU: Operating an autonomous vehicle research powerhouse
Edwin Cohn and the Harvard Blood Factory — Inspiration for a pilot plant BBN
Reach out to me if you’d like more context.
This is a reference to Warren Weaver’s modest quote noting that he “lacked that strange and wonderful creative spark that makes a good researcher.” That spark is what we hope for in some of our technical scouts. This is, first and foremost, an ideas job.
As a reminder, a complete BBN idea consists of a North Star technical vision, some base of revenue that will fund the work, a founder, and a reasonable story on why that individual can recruit the great minds needed to move the field forward with the resources available to them.