The same mission midwifed the birth of the venture-capital industry. Success for America’s Frontier Fund is to do both. ![]() In such a world, etched by great-power competition, financial returns no longer rank above values and venture capital can no longer afford to be mercenary.Ĭhina invests for power, Blashek said, whereas the United States invests for profit. defense community, flagged by some as ripe terrain for self-dealing, it seeks the American advantage in a bifurcating world. and allied leadership and protect democracy around the world.” With deep ties to the U.S. Just as Bush’s report had stirred the government to foot the bill for science, America’s Frontier Fund seeks to enlist the country’s private capital markets for the crusade of its economic rejuvenation.īilling itself as the nation’s “first non-profit, deep-tech investment fund,” the organization’s stated mission is to “advance U.S. An idea hatched and grew, and it launched this summer as America’s Frontier Fund (AFF)-named in homage to the brainchild of Bush. Marine twice deployed overseas, Blashek had answered the nation’s call before. Today, he no longer believes that is the case.Ī former U.S. “We’ve had the luxury over the last 40 years of saying American innovation is the best in the world,” he said in a podcast interview. approach is most lacking: crowding investment and talent into some areas while leaving deserts in others. ![]() In Blashek’s view, the Chinese model-deploying government funds to build strategic sectors and nurture domestic champions-highlights where the U.S. venture-capital system has been the greatest engine of value creation, maybe in history,” Blashek told Foreign Policy. But in 2021, as an executive at Schmidt Futures, the philanthropy started by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, he absorbed a changing world. He had come of age in a globalized world, where technology answered to the flow of capital holding no values, borders, or allegiances. Not long ago in this century, attorney Jordan Blashek studied the document and absorbed its consequences. The report’s prescriptions laid the basis for the National Science Foundation and, in the decades to follow, paved a lasting triumvirate among academia, industry, and government that would be credited with incubating many of the technological advancements clinching the American century. ![]() Basic research was the seed of technological innovation, he wrote, yet “we cannot expect industry adequately to fill the gap.” He called for a renewed government commitment to replenish the coffers for science where the market would not. In an eloquent introduction, he bound the pursuit of national prosperity to the quest for scientific progress, summoning a portrait of the scientist as pioneer, blazing forward to expand the frontier of knowledge.īut inspiration could not do it alone. Allied victory was imminent, and Bush aimed to devise a blueprint that might usher in a boom of postwar research. In 1945, Bush sent his recommendations to the president in a report titled Science, the Endless Frontier. In a cover tribute, Time magazine christened him the nation’s “general of physics.” Under his leadership, 30,000 scientists and researchers throughout the country mobilized for the war effort, leading to the development of powerful new technologies-from radar and amphibious vehicles to the manipulation of uranium atoms, eventually leading to the creation of the atomic bomb. An electrical engineer by training, Bush had been tapped by Roosevelt to helm the OSRD, where he oversaw the profusion of civilian expertise into the military hulk. The letter landed on the desk of Vannevar Bush. “New frontiers of the mind are before us,” he wrote, “and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create … a fuller and more fruitful life.” Yet with his own health failing, Roosevelt was preoccupied more than ever with the welfare of his country in the peacetime soon to come. Victory was in sight for the Allies in World War II. President Franklin Roosevelt issued a letter to his government’s Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).
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