Spectech Lessons and Updated Hypotheses from 2025

In the spirit of being an institutional experiment, we are continuing the tradition of sharing our takeaways from 2025: what we want to double down on, got wrong or updated our beliefs on from last year’s hypotheses and new hypotheses going into 2026.

Double Down:

• Governments run into fundamental tensions around ambitious research.

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

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

• Universities need to be unbundled.

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

Updated/Wrong

• Coordinated research programs are now bottom-of-the-funnel limited.

New

• A lot of technology work makes sense neither for venture funding nor philanthropy.

• There’s a specific new manufacturing paradigm we should focus on.

• We need to build a physical home for misfits and ambitious researchers.

• It is so much easier to make progress on ambitious research when you are already doing things.

• There’s a reason people rarely want to fund the high-risk part of high-risk high-reward research — successful projects need to right-side upside adjusted risk.

• Deadlines are incredibly powerful.

2025 was a weird year in the research world

There was a lot of volatility where the research world touched the government: suspended or revoked grants to universities, hiring freezes and personnel turnover at the ARPAs and other research agencies, and immigration status uncertainty for the many non-citizen scientists in America.

Many new initiatives happened as well. In the US, the Genesis Mission was announced, NSF released an RFI about a new “Tech Labs” initiative, and OSTP explicitly called for new ideas in how science is funding. Internationally, ARIA launched a “FRO founder residency” and Japan launched their Global Startup Campus.

In the private sector, “AI for science” had a big moment. While what “AI for science” means is still evolving, right now it is particular focused on drug and materials discovery. Periodic Labs, Lila Sciences, and Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus raised huge amounts of money among others. Basically every big AI lab announced that they had some sort of science initiative.

Double Down

Governments run into fundamental tensions around ambitious research. This year illustrated why one of our big theses is that we (and other ambitious research orgs) need to depend primarily on private funding. People regularly ask the (reasonable!) question “isn’t this the sort of work the government should