FreakTakes

When it comes to the philanthropic ecosystem, we live in exciting times. A duo of recent posts — one from one of SF’s great thinkers, the other from one of its great general managers — are dedicated to this fact.

Biotechnology is filled with promising young scientists who want to work on big problems, but whose ideas do not neatly fit within academia, venture capital, or even large-scale philanthropy. Academics tend to work within individual laboratories, rather than big teams. And they usually work toward publishable results instead of scalable technologies. (Most papers stop at the proof-of-concept stage.) Venture capital expects large returns within a ten-year period.

Today’s piece is a guest post by Ivan Jayapurna. Ivan is a Programme Director (PD) at the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA). This week marks the launch of his £50m program: Universal Fabricators. Ivan’s program has some very BBN-shaped pieces of work, and he believes some of his most ambitious applicants might see his call for proposals as their chance to launch a BBN of their own. If that sounds like you, and you can solve the problems Ivan outlines below, reach out to him here.

A year ago, I wrote a post saying I’d be taking a half-step back from this Substack in 2025. I adore writing FreakTakes, but I needed more time to throw myself into what I felt was the most important problem I could be working on: building more BBNs. Since then, some version of the following paragraph has graced the top of an astonishing number of operational documents I’ve written.

Today’s piece is a guest post by Alex Obadia. Alex is a new program director at the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). As Alex puts it, his focus is “currently on designing new enabling trust primitives for a world where many more substrates (e.g. DNA, materials, thoughts) are programmable.” I met Alex last month at the ARIA Summit. At the Summit, I got to spend several days talking with ARIA staff, incoming PDs, and ARIA ‘Creators’ — ARIA’s word for R&D contractors.

The Spotify version of today’s episode can be found at this link. Some time in 2023, Tom Kalil told me he thought it would be a good idea to carve out a chunk of time and get to work on some ARPA project histories. The ARPA model was proliferating, and Tom felt these pieces might find a ready audience of ARPA emulators and fans eager to make use of the actionable information. Tom, who was then at Schmidt Sciences and is now President of Renaissance Philanthropy, has good taste.

As some readers know, I’ve recently joined Renaissance Philanthropy (RenPhil). While I hope to put many ideas from FreakTakes into practice at RenPhil, I’ll be particularly focused on one goal: building more BBNs. For those who have not read or do not remember prior pieces on BBN-model orgs (BBNs), the biggest takeaway from my series of ARPA project histories is that, for many of ARPA’s all-time great projects, exceptional projects were the result of exceptional contractors.

I’ve always viewed FreakTakes as a small applied research shop. Discontented geniuses set out to run new science orgs or ambitious scientific philanthropies; I produce pieces that help some of them make decisions that determine parts of how to structure their orgs. I can’t do what they do — I wish I could. They do not have the time to look into the minutiae of the R&D operations from history that inspire their work.

Unlike the rest of the FreakTakes ARPA series, today’s piece does not have the usual narrative structure. It is, instead, a set of personal notes cleaned up and re-structured as a post. While the post is atypical, the ARPA series would be incomplete if I did not outline the factors that mark key regime changes at the agency over time.

ARPA's early decades of success have made the ARPA model iconic. Big wins from ARPA’s early history include autonomous vehicles, the internet, and stealth aircraft technology. Inspired by these successes, scientific grant funders are increasingly emulating the ARPA PM approach to R&D funding. While I wholly support the proliferation of the ARPA model, it's important to not overlook a key lesson of ARPA history: many exceptional ARPA projects resulted from exceptional contractors.