Steve Case Quotes
I do think actually in this case the government does get credit for funding some of the basic research.
Case, Steve. "Interview with Steve Case." Academy of Achievement, 20 Feb. 2004.
The vast majority of public funding for science is decided upon by peer review by scientists themselves. The government officials do not make most of the decisions. They rely on panels of scientists. The reason some of Venter’s early ideas were not funded was that the majority of scientists did not think Venter’s research was a good bet. Venter however is one of those scientists whose ideas have been very unorthodox and his great strength is that he does attack problems in unusual ways and he has had a number of major scientific breakthroughs. Venter is very persuasive and has found it easier to convince businessmen to fund him than the scientists who sit on the government science panels. However, American government money has funded many of the major breakthrough’s of our society including, manufacturing with interchangeable parts, railroads, the telegraph, computers, atomic energy, and the Internet.
This is why the American Government has played such a major role in most of the great technologies in American History. Interchangable Parts (A federal contract with Eli Whitney), Canal Construction (New York State built the Erie Canal), the Railroad (federal government gave hugh tracts of land to build the rail lines to the West), the Telegraph (No one would use it until the government financed the experiment to prove it by creating a line between Baltimore and Washington), AC Electricity, there the city of Rochester NY hired Tessler and Westinghouse to Demonstrate Generating Electricity at Niagra Falls and transmitting it over 20 miles which Edison’s Direct Current could not do), immunization (the Army Medical Corps gave the first grants to universities to develop the science of vaccines and immunization, the computer (in WWII the U. S. financed the development of computers sent to England to implement Turing’s breaking of the German “unbreakable” code), atiomic energy (the Manhattan Project—the largest scientific endeavor the world has known), the Internet (Developed with long term research funds for DARPA the future technology research arm of the Defense Department. American investors and businesspeople took each of these and developed them but the initial steps, when no capitalist dared risk on such basic and futureistic efforts were taken by American Government which probably could never have developed these technologies but the private sector could not do it with government in the role Moritz herein describes.
Stephen McConnell Case is an American entrepreneur, investor, and businessman best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Case joined AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer Services, as a marketing vice-president and became CEO of the company (renamed AOL) in 1991. Since his retirement as chairman of AOL Time Warner in 2003, he has gone on to invest in early and growth-stage startups through his Washington, D.C. based venture capital firm Revolution LLC. Case authored The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future which became a New York Times bestselling book in 2016. Case gave a fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, on May 16, 2017, titled "Building Silicon Valley Outside of the Valley."
