Fixing American Science Funding

This week on the Core Memory podcast – we fix American science and advance civilization.

We were joined by Anastasia Gamick and Adam Marbleston from Convergent Research. They’ve spent the last few years pioneering a new model of science funding centered on FROs or Focused Research Organizations. And FROs take a little bit of explaining.

Convergent Research has backing from Eric Schmidt, James Fickel (a fantastic patron of science) and others and tries to fund small groups of people chasing very big ideas. In essence, Convergent wants to support things that help open up new fields of science and technology, and it funds folks whose ideas might be too expensive for a university lab and/or not obviously commercial enough for typical venture capital. Gamick and Marblestone argue that the FRO model fills a crucial gap in US science funding.

Convergent tends to put $30 million to $50 million into what look like quasi-start-ups and gives them five to six years to build their thing. To date, it has backed around a dozen efforts with a pretty heavy emphasis on the bio-tech and neuroscience fields.

Recently, Convergent also put out the Gap Map, which is a well-researched exploration of all the things that it thinks the world still needs to develop. Go ahead. Poke around.

In this episode, we break down FROs, science funding, the US vs. China, brains and much more.

Our show is made possible by the fine people at E1 Ventures. No cap table is complete without E1.

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