Neuroscientist David Eagleman published in top journals but realized almost nobody read his work. He built a sensory-substitution vest instead, got rejected by NIH and NSF for being too ambitious, then pitched it at TED to venture capitalists who funded it. He now splits his time between government grants for incremental science and VC money for bold bets.
Chapters
I've been running a lab my whole career. I've got almost 120 academic publications in Science and Nature and so on. And maybe 6 people on the planet read these things. It took me a long time to figure that out. And then you get caught in these little World War IIIs in the literature where people— and nobody actually cares what the debate is, even though it seems to you in the moment like it's the biggest deal what the right answer is. So I started getting more interested in figuring out how do I make the rubber hit the road and build things that can affect 53 million people, for example. So 2 years ago, this was an interesting moment for me actually because I got invited to give a TED Talk on the vest. And right when I went out there to give this talk, I received 2 letters from the NIH and the NSF rejecting a grant that I'd put in on the vest. Saying— and I'm not making this up— one of the grant rejections said, it's not incremental enough. But what they meant by that is it's this very forward-looking thing. And what I need to do is show this and then show this and then spend the next 3 years showing that. Anyway, at the same time I got those 2 rejection letters, I went out to TED. I presented the vest. I showed what it could do. I showed videos of things happening with it. And all these VCs were there. I was going to say, how many checks were written? Exactly. Well, I got to take my choice. I got to talk to everybody and then say, OK, you seem like you'd be the best match. So we got funded, and it was a real change for me. It was a real eye-opener for me. So now, the way I see it is there's a spectrum of scientific questions where government granting is useful for some kinds of those questions, and VC funding is useful for other kinds. So now I'm sort of keeping a foot in both worlds and really trying to take advantage of the big leapy questions that are perfect for VC funding.
