[vervez]

SBIR funding is critical for hard science ventures early on. It's also a good indicator to future investors of potential hard science projects that a panel of experts in the area has reviewed and approved government funding for the idea, and the team is at least decently competent to meet the milestones of the SBIR. This helped Ginkgo Bioworks before they received more than half a billion in private investment.

[mNovak]

There's decently large amounts of money to be had with SBIRs, but they are a moving target--you end up stitching together many different smaller projects to slowly ping pong your way to the end goal. Of course they're also very slow to apply, decide, reapply, etc

[neltnerb]

And consume massive amounts of a small startup team's highest skill expertise for weeks to have any chance of getting.

And have a known death valley and cash flow issue unless you have other investment already.

But they're a nice to have for sure. Just not enough to keep moving for long enough to get most hard tech startups funded.

[vervez]

I'd be interested in seeing citations for the known death valley. This is the second time I've heard this anecdote but have never seen the evidence.

[neltnerb]

Oh, no one would probably bother to cite it because it's right there in the request for proposals in black and white and they explicitly talk about it repeatedly at the SBIR conferences.

You finish your phase 1 in 9 months to a year depending. Then you apply for phase 2 which takes 3-6 months to review and fund. That's the death valley I mean, the lag between finishing phase 1 and starting phase 2.

If you don't have non-grant funding by then, you're self-funding the company for six months of being strung along waiting for them to make a decision. It sucks, especially when VCs have no interest in funding projects that are as hard to understand as my stuff (catalysts and chemicals and machine learning) when they can just fund Uber for cats or whatever.

I'm too tired to keep trying for it, but at least people are finally starting to recognize that chemical manufacturing infrastructure is pretty critical and that we don't understand much of it at all and that if we want to use bio-sourced chemicals we need to really understand this at a global systems level an awful lot better.

But we won't, we'll just try to bolt on bio stuff to horrible legacy systems and make a marginal improvement instead of a generational breakthrough. But if anyone reading this happens to actually be working on this give me a ring... it's my passion in life to fix this because I see it as reducing energy consumption and also improving agriculture through improved ammonia production processes. I am just unable to work on it because of life. And I really don't want to start another company at this point.

[vervez]

The way I've seen startups make it work is to save part of the indirect for the worst-case scenario of no bridge funding for the 3-6 month period. If you are able to get into an accelerator that takes a small cut and aligns with your area, the amount of indirect saved (.4*250k) available could be sufficient to bridge a low-cost org for 3-6 months. Even then, it's still a gamble as to whether you'll receive the Phase II in that time.

As for timeline, you're able to apply for the Phase II to kick in right as the Phase I is ending. I've seen that work but it requires planning and long hours to perform research and write the next phase proposal. There's also direct to Phase II for ~$2m in one grant.

If you have outside responsibilities and don't want to risk that bridge, you could try and submit the direct to Phase II, which would also help develop your idea to pitch to VCs in clean-tech space.

[vervez]

With hard science ventures that sometimes have a hard time findng the 'killer app' for the technology, I think the experience and learning from ping ponging around is a feature. Yes, startups need to plan for the long and uncertain apply-decide-reapply cycle