WAY 37Invest in the Future Ecosystem: Funding the future requires every part of the economy to chip in.
About the Way
The key question for any moonshot‐seeking organization is, how do we finance the long path from an almost impossible idea to scale? As Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg underscored to his shareholders and the general public when relaunching his company in 2021, “This is not an investment that is going to be profitable for us any time in the near future.”1 Successful moonshots are built on a financial model that supports the pipeline from curiosity‐driven imagination and science to lab‐proven concepts and technologies that eventually scale to “ubiquitous products that people want and can afford to buy,” borrowing a comment from Bill Gates.2
Several scholars have long recognized this broader funding need, such as Andrew Lo, a prominent economist and MIT professor in finance, who argues that a new financial model is needed to help finance breakthroughs or longshots as he calls them. Even after a breakthrough in nuclear fusion at MIT—which in itself is a major technical milestone—Lo acknowledges that “another 10 years and about $5 to $10 billion in additional investments” is required to reach the bigger goal.3
One aspect of the funding need is to consider handoffs between groups (see Way 42: Fund the Handoffs), ensuring a smooth funding path for a new vision, while another aspect is considering the overall ecosystem of partners needed over time to make a moonshot real. ...
Get Building Moonshots now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
