Investing in America’s Innovation Engine
While aboard a plane nosediving into Baghdad, one may be forgiven for pondering how one’s life path could lead from vacuum cleaners to minesweeping robots. Yet, not only does Orin Hoffman, of MIT’s The Engine venture capital firm, share this humbling connection, but also how it advances an overarching narrative of the United States national industrial innovation base, VCs, and the crucial roles served by tough tech entrepreneurs.
Public-private partnerships may not be what immediately comes to most people’s minds when asked about frontier tech, though government funding for basic scientific research has been commonplace in the United States for a century. “Patient capital” — a class of investors with a temperament to nurture big-bet science and engineering ventures — is helping to bridge gaps in the national “capital stack”, Orin shares on Tough Tech Today. We learn from Orin about how his team at The Engine cultivates their investment thesis, about whether a technical founder should find a business-savvy partner, and work-in-progress ideas for improving the United States as a whole by nurturing deeply technical startups via diversified, trusted capital networks.
Listen on Apple, Spotify, Overcast, or Google (and wherever else podcasts are available)
- Episode page, transcript, and podcast listening links
- Orin Hoffman on LinkedIn
- The Engine
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You may also like:
- Tough Tech Today’s episode “Venturing with federal tech”, featuring Will Dickson and Trinity Torres of FedTech
- Tough Tech Today’s episode “Launching dual-use ventures”, featuring Katy Person of the MIT Innovation Initiative
- jmill’s article, Who’s Your Ally? How Tech Startups Navigate Venture Capital and Federal Funding.
