Today’s piece is a guest post by Alex Obadia. Alex is a new program director at the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). As Alex puts it, his focus is “currently on designing new enabling trust primitives for a world where many more substrates (e.g. DNA, materials, thoughts) are programmable.”
I met Alex last month at the ARIA Summit. At the Summit, I got to spend several days talking with ARIA staff, incoming PDs, and ARIA ‘Creators’ — ARIA’s word for R&D contractors. My discussions with the ARIA creators and incoming PDs who read FreakTakes were particularly informative. In these discussions, we were able to quickly get into the weeds on ideas explored on FreakTakes that these researchers had already read, considered, and about which they had practical thoughts they wanted to discuss.
My brief interaction with Alex was one example. Alex attended a session at the Summit in which we discussed not just the possibilities for BBNs in the ARIA ecosystem, but the practical financial problems BBNs might encounter. Several days after the session, Alex reached out because he had drafted a blog post outlining his understanding of the financial problems and several concrete ways they might be overcome.
I loved Alex’s framing of the problem and shared his excitement to move the brainstorm into a public forum. I quickly shared a summary of Tom Kalil’s thoughts on the four biggest financial hurdles great BBN founders would need to deal with, and, with that, told Alex I’d be happy to hand over the reins to FreakTakes for the day.
I’ll let Alex take it from here!
Clerk updating the “Market Score” at the Chicago Board of Trade, 1949. Photo by a 21-year-old Stanley Kubrick. | Photo courtesy of Library of Congress , LOOK Magazine Photo Collection
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Wanted: New Instruments to Fund BBNs
By: Alex Obadia
BBNs are entities that provide services critical to R&D breakthroughs. The acronym ‘BBN’ (coined in this blog!) comes from a famous example — Bolt, Beranek, & Newman, which was instrumental to the creation of ARPAnet. BBNs are often compared to Focused Research Organizations (FROs) because they’d attract similar people. But while FROs require significant funding, BBNs would be the consulting-ish approach to FROs, contributing to R&D by servicing others in need of R&D support.
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