sector · cluster
Science & progress
Make research productivity compound instead of decay.
Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen and others have shown ideas are getting harder to find: per-researcher productivity has declined across nearly every domain. The agenda is institutional — focused research orgs (FROs), better grantmaking, replication infrastructure, AI-for-science tooling, and the dense citation/community fabric Collison and Cowen have been calling for since 2019.
lead voice
Patrick Collison · Progress →Problems in this sector
1 rankedCompanies on it
9 mapped →Originally nonprofit research lab, now capped-profit. Safety and superalignment teams alongside capabilities work.
Cell programming platform. Biosecurity Division runs metagenomic surveillance and pathogen detection at scale.
Fully automated precision-parts factories for aerospace, defense, and infrastructure. Removing labor cost from the BOM.
Browser-based coding platform. 100M+ learners worldwide; AI agent for app-building compresses learn-to-ship cycle.
AI-driven drug discovery. Industrializes biology through automated phenotypic screening at scale.
ML-driven drug discovery from Daphne Koller. Combines stem-cell biology with deep learning.
Focused Research Organization for complex human disease. Funding structure designed to outrun the NIH grant cycle.
Incubates Focused Research Organizations (FROs), Cultivarium, E11, LemonBay, tackling neglected-by-structure science.
Alphabet-spinoff applying AlphaFold-class ML to drug design. Deals with Novartis and Eli Lilly.
Capital on it
8 allocators →Emergent Ventures
GrantFast grants. High-variance, unconventional, talent-first.
Thiel Fellowship
Fellowship$100k to stop out of school and build something important.
O'Shaughnessy Fellowships
Fellowship$100k for creators across domains, art, science, history, startups.
Activate Fellowship
AcceleratorTwo-year salary and national-lab access for scientists taking PhD research to market.
Speculative Technologies
Focused Research OrgARPA-style coordinated research programs for big-if-true platform tech.
Deep Science Ventures
Venture StudioOutcome-first venture creation. Define the holy-grail outcome, then recruit founders.
Lux Capital
Venture CapitalCounter-conventional science at the edges of physics and biology.
Fifty Years
Venture CapitalEvery portfolio company must solve a UN SDG. Profit with purpose, no exceptions.
Voices
5 thinkers →Further reading
- We Need a New Science of Progress · Collison & Cowen · The Atlantic
- Progress page · Patrick Collison
- Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? · Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen, Webb · 2020
- Roots of Progress