Somewhat related, most academia is not focused on source code quality or its suitability for posterity. If you absolutely need to mime or plunder academia to succeed in your startup, pair that with a software industry veteran who can scale and secure your technology operation.

Remember, PG is a Lisper.

In my experience in European research, you don't get research funding if you don't work on something relevant or practical to the industry.

I have the opposite opinion. US funding sources for science and engineering tend to be very government-heavy rather than industry-based; but in my experience those government grants, particularly DoD, emphasize research with specific practical ends. The obvious exception is NSF, but Europe also has similar obvious exceptions at about the same rate.

The big difference between the US and Europe, however, is that universities in the US depend on grants to fund PhD students. Many (most?) European countries have national funding programs for their PhDs, which frees up both the students and their advisors to work on whatever fancies them regardless of practicality. France is particularly notorious for this. US academics do not have this luxury.

In my field, by far the lion's share of impractical (Fun! I love it! But impractical) work comes from Europe.

Yeah this is specific to Europe, in particular Germany, where companies such as BMW would send engineers to work on a defined research project at a university, and then adopt the research if it pans out. In the US there’s far more leeway, and part of being a good PI is stealthily inserting yourself own agenda into the DOT grant proposal, and those in the DOT will give you the leeway knowing that’s “how it works”

I guess this varies a lot. To my shame I don't have hard numbers (! I really should have.)

Personally I've worked on a half dozen global research network projects bringing together both public and private funding and 10-15 organisations, mixed universities, research institutes, and small to behemoth companies.

The target is always some wide ranging new radical technology platform and they spawn a bunch of startups and spin off projects.

Some targets can turn out to be too difficult, or simply wrong, but I've never seen a project that hasn't lead to at least one startup / product / new technology.

Oh! That’s super interesting — what are some examples of this happening?

Eg: Start out looking at nanoparticle functionalisation, then stumble on a very useful sensor application or targeted molecular delivery.

Eg: Work on autonomous air sensor, then find simple off shoot application for tuberculosis using a completely different technology.

Eg: Build a medical laser for transdermal drug delivery then find applications in dental work and scar tissue removal.

Eg: Design a flexible heterogeneous compute cluster for hpc application, then get customers who want it for the low administration cost.

You start by bringing some very competent and diverse people together to tackle some tricky and new problem. Then after a while you'll have found a bunch of peripheral questions and applications for one thing or other you create in the project.

People talking and sharing experience and knowledge will almost always find new stuff out in the dark. If you're working on the edge of knowledge there is almost always interesting stuff hiding just outside the light of your personal flashlight. Bringing people together in multidisciplinary projects is amazing.

From what I've seen, this is mainly a European thing. Chinese and US funding is designed to produce practical value, at least in theory.