• Ben Reinhardt’s career has been a journey from academia to NASA labs to high-growth startups and venture capital, all in search of the right institutional home for creating the world that has never been.
• He found that academia is great for suggesting new technologies, but NASA and the tech industry are better for creating functional systems that can be scaled.
• He tried to start his own startup, but found that the pressure to show results on a compressed timescale led to worse technology or failing to meet expectations.
• He then tried venture capital, but found that the same incentives followed him.
• He eventually decided to build his own institution, Speculative Technologies, which is modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
• Speculative Technologies is a nonprofit research organization that prioritizes functional systems over novel ideas, and aims to create the world that has never been.
Published February 15, 2023
Visit Works in Progress to read Works in Progress’s original post Notes on Progress: Breakfast with g
