
Peter Thiel launches Breakout Labs to fund bold early-stage research - pitdesi
http://gigaom.com/2011/10/25/peter-thiel-breakout-labs/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom
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repos
Regardless of whether the amount is enough to fund scientific research
endeavors (which range at > 250k/ year), Breakout Labs is a reflection of the
current nature of scientific research.

The NIH or other foundations tend only to fund "safe" research proposals.
Someone with a more radical idea with no funding resources is effectively shut
down. 50k may not be enough to research something for a year, but it may be
enough to prototype an idea. Win for creativity, win for science.

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hugh3
Are you speaking from experience, or from what you've heard?

I don't know much about NIH funding, but if you're looking for funding from
(say) NSF, DOE or DARPA it doesn't have to be _that_ "safe" except in the
sense that they really want you to produce _something_ publishable... not
necessarily particularly useful. I figure that any worthwhile research project
_ought_ to be able to be massaged into a form where you're producing something
worth publishing regardless of what happens.

NIH might be different, due to the larger and more expensive scale of these
sorts of projects.

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raheemm
$50k to $300K grants seem awfully low for research projects. Heck you can
barely build a good app with $50k.

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argv_empty
I'm not too well-versed in research funding, but NSF CAREER awards seem to be
around twice that (i.e. $100k to $600k) for a few years of funding. I suppose
the recipient would probably be getting funding from other sources as well?

As for building a good app, I don't know if I'd expect a what gets produced by
a conventional research group to be a nicely polished, ready-to-deploy app.
Grad students are probably somewhat cheaper than developers too.

~~~
hugh3
_Grad students are probably somewhat cheaper than developers too_

Actually, the cost of funding a grad student is surprisingly large. If you're
a professor with an external grant, then the first thing that happens is that
the university takes some off the top (around 40%) which is supposed to pay
for all the office space, admin staff, and so forth that you and your group
get. Then you've gotta pay the tuition for the grad student on top of what
you're paying them... meaning (so I hear) that it's no more expensive to hire
a postdoc making $50K than a grad student making $25K. And of course the cost
of a $50K postdoc is isn't $50K, it's close to $100K once all the random other
costs are taken into account. So in the end, you need at least $100K in
research funding for each grad student-year.

~~~
juiceandjuice
That's not entirely true at the places I've been and people I've talked to.
The reason is because a lot of that overhead gets waived if the professor
teaches. Usually one class/year = 1 grad student. That's why many grad
students (PhD candidates) TA at first too, because unless they are really,
really good, they aren't going to be worth it to give them an RA position,
especially if they are taking classes and they can't be productive enough for
a professor. In a large group, usually a few professors will teach, and the
rest will supplement grad students with NSF or some other sort of grants.

The last NSF grant I helped with, done by a professor I worked for, was
essentially for the grad student's salary they get to live off of, as the rest
of the costs were waived by the school (in this case, 25k/year for 3 years)

~~~
djcapelis
This doesn't match my experiences for most major research universities with
active research programs. It's very standard to fund students as researchers
through their time in grad school (especially in bio, but in CS too) and it's
also very common to charge ICR and the tuition waiver. (Which is usually
something the grant has to pay for.)

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choxi
I hope this style of funding takes off. I'll be the first to admit that I buy
into the hype around social, mobile, realtime, and all those buzzwords for
consumer apps but the future I dream about involves taking on the bigger
challenges, basically the ones outlined in the Grand Challenges for
Engineering: <http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/>

~~~
DilipJ
I hope so too! Thiel definitely seems like the most visionary of the
billionaires in the world, he probably will end up having a greater positive
impact than anyone else on the Forbes list.

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stuntgoat
Ideally, they would be a hub for innovative researchers on a shoestring-budget
that could end up working together on even more ambitious projects. Or a good
leader might be able to recruit from the applicant pool to break up a larger
project into small groups that could focus on specific parts of the research.

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rms
Anyone know what % royalties they are asking for?

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mtraven
Hm, and just a few weeks ago Thiel was predicting the "end of the future":
[http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/278758/end-future-
pet...](http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/278758/end-future-peter-thiel)

Bipolar much?

~~~
wladimir
The articles fit exactly.

Most investments these days (even from the govt) are in short-term quick-to-
realize projects. If this continues, we'll have endless electronic social
playtoys, living as grown-up children in walled gardens, but the 'grand
future' would be gone. No spaceflight, no radical new techniques, no new
frontiers.

That's why people that are rich and interested in longer-term research, like
him, could start a fund to fund more radical and long-term research proposals.
Something that was originally the scope of university research, but times
change.

~~~
mtraven
I'm all for billionaires using their money to fund research, but that NRO
article was so bad that I question his judgement.

1) I don't know what tech slowdown he's talking about. The cost of genome
sequencing is falling at faster-than-Moore's law rates; that's probably the
most significant growth area right now.

2) Thiel is a Singulatarian [3]; I thought the point of that was that
exponential growth is inevitable. It's that coupled with this article that
leads me to dub him bipolar. If you believe in the Singularity I presume you
believe it will happen with or without any particular pool of money.

3) This paragraph. Maybe sounding like Grampa Simpson is required to get into
NRO. And who in their right mind considers Robert Moses and Brasilia good
models for anything?

> "towards the end Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the
> 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong
> to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters
> today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary
> genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks
> later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the
> hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress
> was lost."

Damn hippies! And here I heard that they helped invent personal computing [1]
and saved physics [2].

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
Pers...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
Personal/dp/0143036769) [2] <http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com/> [3]
<http://singularityu.org/?p=1749>

