[randomsearch]

No, we said fund _people_ not status. Someone’s status is their job title etc. that should be irrelevant in funding decisions.

Funding projects is a terrible idea that you should keep at a minimum. If you fund projects you will end up with the BS we have now - marketing in the form of grant proposals.

I think a really helpful analogy for how science should be funded is to think of how angels and VCs fund early stage startups - I mean, how they really fund them. Which is: is this a promising area to startup within? Is this a great team? And that is pretty much it.

The downside of this approach I think is that personal biases can creep in and create a lack of diversity. You can counter that with pots of funding that directly target diversity.

Fund people, your assessment of their ability, their team, and their area of interest.

[magic_hamster]

The question then is, how do select the people. In VCs, like you said, you'd look for a great team. What does that mean? It means mostly one thing: track record. This is what I meant by status. It's not your title. In academia, very similarly to tech, some people are rising stars, and they can get funding for anything they like. I'm just saying, consider the project and not just the person.

[frodetb]

I don't think that's accurate. One of the things that make incubation and choosing which startups to fund so difficult is precisely the lack of track record. According to Graham himself, when everyone involved with a startup are new to the scenes they're invading, you instead end up relying on such nebulous concepts as "imagination", "naughtyness"[1], or "earnestness"[2].

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/earnest.html