• 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
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