Tough Tech Venture Capital and America's Innovation Engine with Orin Hoffman

Tough Tech Today with Meyen and Miller

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.

Show Notes

• Episode page, transcript, and podcast listening links: https://toughtechtoday.com/investing-in-americas-innovation-engine-featuring-orin-hoffman-of-the-engine/
• Orin Hoffman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/orin-hoffman-a7489230
• The Engine: http://engine.xyz/
• Subscribe with your favorite podcast service: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1169378/5761015
• Watch this show on Youtube: https://youtu.be/WEj-SC5wfpQ

You may also like...

• Tough Tech Today’s episode “Venturing with federal tech”, featuring Will Dickson and Trinity Torres of FedTech: https://toughtechtoday.com/venturing-into-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: https://toughtechtoday.com/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: https://medium.com/@iamjmill/whos-your-ally-e2ff6068cd3a

अध्यायों

1. Identifying investable technology fields (00:00:00)

2. Joining iRobot (00:01:20)

3. Military minesweeping and… a vacuum? (00:03:03)

4. Deploying oversees to save lives with robots (00:04:05)

5. How’d-I-get-here-moment: Nosediving into Iraq in a C-130 (00:06:13)

6. Frustrations with tough tech (00:07:15)

7. The Engine’s investment thesis (00:08:27)

8. Gaps in the ‘capital stack’ faced by entrepreneurs (00:10:51)

9. Standing up better grant programs, such as the Endless Frontier Act (00:13:34)

10. Identifying investable technology fields (00:15:34)

11. Analytical Space: An example of a successful public-private partnership (00:17:57)

12. VC perception of public-private partnerships (00:20:07)

13. Understanding The Engine (00:22:03)

14. Wetlabs, machine shops, and vast entrepreneurial workspaces (00:23:47)

15. Our portfolio: Climate change, Human health, and Computing of Tomorrow (00:25:14)

16. Balancing tolerance for technical risk and a startup’s potential for risk (00:26:36)

17. Patient capital = 18-year timelines (00:29:11)

18. Orin’s career pathway: engineering, government, investing (00:31:02)

19. When a software engineer realizes he hasn’t booted into Linux in two years (00:33:12)

20. A breakthrough area of tough tech? (00:34:09)

21. Re-enabling and re-invigorating industries that left the United States (00:35:25)

22. Workforce distribution and diffusion of innovation (00:36:58)

23. Improving access to capital (00:39:50)

24. Are distributed workforces compatible with tough tech companies? (00:40:33)

25. The Engine is an experiment and is growing beyond Boston-Cambridge (00:41:30)

26. TikTok, ITAR, and algorithms affecting psychological perception (00:43:02)

27. Set-asides for tough tech companies promoting employment and on-shoring tech (00:44:32)

28. If you were king for a day… (00:45:27)

29. Early-stage tough tech startups need diversified capital (00:46:13)

30. Supporting n = 1 startups with large financing needs (00:47:37)

31. Tough tech entrepreneurs: “Come talk to us,” earlier rather than later (00:48:53)

32. Must technical founders pair-up with a business partner? (00:49:57)