Science Angels

I recently proposed an idea to fund “science angels” to find and support compelling new researchers, ideas, and experiments. I wanted to organize the writing in one place, and provide a preface about my motivations and inspiration.

The science angel hypothesis is simple: the lessons of venture capital and startup investing can be applied in scientific funding scenarios to improve the diversity of research and accelerate discovery. Here’s how it will work:

Foundations and companies seed fund the program. A group of scientists are selected and each given a budget of $50-100k to contribute to projects on Experiment. They are free to use their discretion in how they recruit, select, and allocate that amount. At the end of a one year period, they will have a portfolio of experiments to show their work. All of this is done in public on Experiment, with minimal overhead and the potential to leverage additional support from the crowd. Based on past data, we estimate those $100k budgets will turn into $250-500k in funded science and 25-50 supported projects. The program will be evaluated using the same (or as close as possible) methodology used for the Wagner and Alexander assessment of the SGER program.

The Case for Science Angels

Fixing the Back Burner  — The data we have from the National Science Foundation on funding smaller, high-risk, high-reward research ideas outside of the traditional peer-review process is incredibly promising. It also tells us that this funding technique is currently underutilized among federal agencies.

True Believers — Sustained belief in the earliest stages of curiosity is critical. Adding financial momentum during that period and designating people to act as true believers would increase risk-taking at the edges.

Making a Scene — Nascent fields of scientific research can be accelerated and improved through a combination of connection, funding, and cohorts.

My Motivation

The early days of our OpenROV effort — a project (then company) to build and distribute a low-cost, open-source underwater robot — are well documented, but there was one part of the story that didn’t come up until a recent interview with Mike Roberts of Outside Magazine:

In early 2012, they worked their way into a meeting with the Marine Science and Technology Foundation, a nonprofit funded by Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google, and his wife, Wendy. The Schmidts were offering grants for projects that advanced oceanographic research. Stackpole and Lang showed up with a barely functioning prototype and a speech about the world-changing potential of a budget ROV. (They neglected to mention the gold.)

“They said, ‘OK, what do you need?’ ” says Lang. “At that point, we were strapped for cash and thinking only about the very next steps. So we asked for a few thousand dollars to buy parts to build 15 more prototypes.”

The foundation was flummoxed. The ask was so low—most of their grants were in the hundreds of thousands—that a typical proposal review process didn’t make sense. In the end, Lang and Stackpole walked away with just over $7,000, promising to submit their receipts.

Of course, that story didn’t make headlines at the time. We were two people with a wild idea and prototype that barely worked. But that grant made all the difference. We used every penny of that funding to finish the build and document the design. By the time we submitted those receipts, we had launched a Kickstarter campaign which generated another $111,000 and connected us to our first hundred or so community members. We were well on our way, surprising both the foundation and ourselves.

The experience stuck with me. The small grant, nudge of confidence, and community-based crowdfunding were a powerful combination. As I learned over the years talking to other researchers and inventors, it was a novel path to bringing a new scientific tool into the world.

We started testing philanthropic ideas of our own, first through a partnership with DonorsChoose, where we used their network of teachers to distribute 50 OpenROV kits to educators and classrooms around the country. Through that experience, I realized that the crowdfunding platform served as more than just a way to raise money. It was also a filtering and transparency mechanism — an open grant proposal and reporting mechanism. We decided to build a platform ourselves. In 2014, we built Open Explorer to connect our community of users and citizen scientists. In 2018, We organized and ran a project called the S.E.E. Initiative to donate hundreds of our Trident underwater drones to researchers and conservation groups around the world. It worked surprisingly well. We sold Open Explorer to National Geographic in the hopes they would scale up the impact. It has since evolved into Field Notes, an interactive tool that allows explorers to document their expeditions in a new format. 

The core idea of “platform philanthropy” marches on. Others are continuing to test and build, including us.

Intermediaries Needed

Despite the exciting possibilities of platform philanthropy and the empirical results from the SGER program, most agencies and foundations are hesitant. It’s a new thing. For science funders especially, the idea is outside the zone of familiarity.

It makes sense when you look at incentive structures in those organizations and institutions. Many program officers operate in a situation of asymmetric career risk, which Ben Reinhardt coined and describes:

You can’t get fired for failing in the conventional way, especially early in your career. You can get fired or have your career hampered by failing in a weird way. On the flip-side, in most career situations you don’t capture a lot of the value of the wild success that can come from taking weird risks.

A similar dissonance — an obvious desire to fund high risk, high reward endeavors coupled with a clear institutional barrier to doing so — led to the creation of the modern venture capital industry. In his book on the history of venture capital, VC, Tom Nicholas covers the discussions and meetings of the New England Council, which led directly to the formation of the American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) in 1946, widely credited as the prototype of the modern venture capital fund:

It was estimated that about 45 percent of New England wealth was held by institutions like trust and insurance companies. [Ralph] Flanders estimated that institutions held in excess of $25 billion ($250 billion today). Because of their traditional investment philosophy and the need for regulatory compliance, fiduciaries engaged in very conservative management of assets. Also, even if these institutional investors could overcome their conservatism, direct investments in entrepreneurial startups would be implausible. “We would under no circumstances directly make investments in risky new undertakings for the reason that we are not staffed for that purpose,” [Merrill] Griswold would later comment. “We do not know anything about the technique of the thing, and we would probably end up making fools of ourselves if we tried.”

Unlocking this pool of institutional capital on the supply side of investment finance would be critical to ARD, and more generally to the development of the venture capital industry. Griswold articulated the need for an entity like ARD in terms of the long tail. “It is very risky to put money into a brand new project. Some of them are bound to fail,” he cautioned. “But if you secure diversification, by buying fifteen or twenty of those indirectly through a special company, it does not matter that four or five of them may fail because the others, the hope is, will more than make up for it.

The ARD structure was ultimately supplanted by the limited partnership model, but the historical importance remains, especially in terms of funding the nascent computer industry. It was a permission slip to experiment with new models for investing, a process that continues today with the creation of organizations like Y Combinator or AngelList. The ARD was an important first step on the path to venture capital which grew symbiotically with the startup ecosystem and the emerging new philosophies of how to build companies.

We created the Experiment Foundation to be the ARD of science — a sandbox for learning how we can improve. We’re excited about the Science Angel program as a first step. There’s much more to come in this story.  You can subscribe below to receive future updates. If you’d like to participate as a funder of the program, please reach out.