Spectech Lessons and Updated Hypotheses from 2024

In the spirit of being an institutional experiment, we wanted to share some of the key takeaways from 2024: what we got right and what we are updating from our hypotheses going into the year, some lessons from 2024, and then outline some big hypotheses going into 2025.

In addition to our actual outputs, we hope that through the feedback loop between meta-scientific ideas and executing on those ideas, we can pave the way for other institutional experiments. I realize that each of these points wants its own memo unpacking it. I hope to create those over the coming year.

Below is a summary of our takeaways, divided into hypotheses from last year that we want to double down on, beliefs that we have updated or were wrong about, and new hypotheses going into 2025. I expand on each one further down. (As a gentle nudge that we are subscriber- and donor- supported, the updated and new hypotheses are paywalled for now.)

Double Down:

• There are far more ideas that don’t fit into existing institutions than a single organization can handle.

• Governments run into fundamental tensions around ambitious research.

• Working with Bureaucracies is incredibly hard for a new organization.

• Materials and manufacturing are an incredibly impactful place to focus for new institutional models.

• Universities have developed a monopoly on pre- and non-commercial research.

• Exclusively working with external performers in the 21st century is severely limiting.

Updated/Wrong

• Corporate research has been gutted.

• It is harder to fund 1-off ambitious research programs in materials and manufacturing than we thought.

• There are a lot of subtle annoying things about nonprofits.

New

• Universities need to be unbundled.

• PI-based funding is holding back progress.

• As an organization, we need to figure out how to use AI well.

• There are a lot of systemic things widening the ‘valley of death.’

• In many domains, IP is net negative.

Double down

I think most of our hypotheses going into 2024 were spot on. I’m not going to touch on all of them, but I’ll highlight the most important ones that I want to double down on and the additional evidence for them.

There are far more ideas that don’t fit into existing institutions than a single organization can handle. Throughout 2024, we constantly ran into people with ambitious ideas that don’t fit into normal institutional boxes: some of them were stuck, some of them were struggling