Startups Don't Build Technology - by Kasey Klimes

For those interested in the urban housing crisis, I recently published What Really Drives Housing Prices? on my personal blog. There I write and share analysis on subject matter that I find deeply important but off-topic for this newsletter. Now, for your (ir)regularly scheduled broadcast… Though densely interdependent, building technology and building products are two distinct activities. Technology-building—the invention of new technologies—is a higher risk and slower activity than product-building. It requires unusually patient capital. For this reason it tends to happen in research labs funded by large governmental, academic, or corporate institutions. You can trace most technologies back to these institutional research labs. The US government is an especially potent generator of new technology. Government research labs like DARPA developed GPS, cellular communication, touch screens, drones, accelerometers, the first “Street View”, and funded the development of mRNA vaccines. We al

For those interested in the urban housing crisis, I recently published What Really Drives Housing Prices? on my personal blog. There I write and share analysis on subject matter that I find deeply important but off-topic for this newsletter. Now, for your (ir)regularly scheduled broadcast… Though densely interdependent, building technology and building products are two distinct activities. Technology-building—the invention of new technologies—is a higher risk and slower activity than product-building. It requires unusually patient capital. For this reason it tends to happen in research labs fu