CAM machining advancements were mostly pushed forward by car companies and government spending, right? Almost all of the computing technology we use today began as a .gov or .mil project, or came from some private lab with funding from the .gov or .mil.
I think that that rather neatly undermines your point.
It wasn't the VCs spending lots of money. The big desktop revolution (outside of Apple) was initially driven by IBM, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari...all relatively established businesses partnering with younger firms for software or whatnot.
Sure, we had Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but at the end of the day it seems like they're all gone and blown away while the more lasting impacts remain attributed to academia (.edu and .gov again), defense (.mil), or consumer software not really driven by venture capital.
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CAM machining advancements were mostly pushed forward by car companies and government spending, right? Almost all of the computing technology we use today began as a .gov or .mil project, or came from some private lab with funding from the .gov or .mil.
I think that that rather neatly undermines your point.
It wasn't the VCs spending lots of money. The big desktop revolution (outside of Apple) was initially driven by IBM, Commodore, Tandy, and Atari...all relatively established businesses partnering with younger firms for software or whatnot.
Sure, we had Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics, but at the end of the day it seems like they're all gone and blown away while the more lasting impacts remain attributed to academia (.edu and .gov again), defense (.mil), or consumer software not really driven by venture capital.