
Silicon Valley VCs don't want Obama's money, think Google is passe  - peter123
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10246759-2.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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motoko
8\. Health care administration will be the fastest-growing sector. (The
panelists were so bored by this trend they didn't even discuss it.)

 _Warning Bells_

Information technology venture capitalists didn't "want" to discuss "the
fastest-growing sector" which constitutes the transmission, storage, and
processing of structured information?

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philwelch
Sadly, health care is so strongly regulated that starting up in that sector
might be more of a legal challenge than a technical challenge.

With this administration, the very parameters of the market are within
question. How much will be taken over by the government? Who wants to sell to
the government?

~~~
johnnybgoode
Yes. There was an Economist article related to this, about progress in health
care in India that wouldn't really be possible in Western countries:
<http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13496367>

Health care isn't just about making new treatments possible; it's also about
making existing treatments _efficient_ and _inexpensive_.

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iamelgringo
* While acknowledging that the administration's heart is in the right place, he pointed out that traditionally, direct investment in technology by governments doesn't work out well. He said the United State's subsidies on ethanol, France's decision to skip the Internet in favor of the state-sponsored Minitel, and Japan's direct investment in supercomputers as it tried to spend its way out of a recession were examples of poor investments. *

I'd be willing to say that VC's aren't really interested in government funded
research because it actively competes with them.

I've been thinking about the roll of government funded research for a while,
and I've been amazed at how much science is advanced by military and
government funding. Take the tour at the Computer History Museum. I doubt that
computing history would have been the same without massive government funding
of Colossus and ENIAC. Where would the internet be without ARPANET?

Where would nuclear energy be without the Manhattan project? Where would
chemical science be without the huge funding in World War I:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_funding_of_science>

Would our understanding of technologies like radar and sonar be the same
without government funding? Would the semi-conductor industry be the same
without government investment at it's inception? Certainly NASA has developed
a few good technologies.

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pj
VC's are the best predictors of irrational investment ideas.

