VC doesn’t put money into research, VC puts money to productization once someone else (government, ideally) has paid for research.

There isn't a good likelihood on strong return on those type of investments. You need real engineering talent and leaders. You can glue together a delivery or dating app with a bunch of 25 year olds who just got out of a ruby on rails bootcamp, raise a few million with charismatic/well connected leaders/founders, and maybe gain enough users to be acquired or something. Anything in materials science is going to require some deep expertise, labs/machines/composites/fabrication/manufacturing setups, inside connections at the DoD, trial and error that costs millions.

Yeah, I agree, its way cooler, but way more risky for VC.

It's not at all obvious to me that it's more risky than some of the BS that gets hundreds of millions of dollars in VC funding.

Timelines matter. The BS will either return the millions in a couple years or it won't. Basic research may return much more, but your best case is still many years before you gets results. The risk is actually higher with basic research than for BS as well - the pet rock earned money and there are plenty of other examples of stupid things working well quickly. Basic research in fusion hasn't returned anything yet even though the physics has said it works (though with recent reports maybe fusion is just around thee corner - or maybe it is still 50 years out)

See, the thing is, you're making an argument about how VC works, and I'm making an argument about allocation of money towards VC vs. other socially beneficial projects.

I understand how VC works. I'm annoyed that - let's even take the Saudis as an example, since they fund half of Silicon Valley anyway - would rather flush their money down the drain on stupid shit than do long-term projects that may help secure their existence post-oil.

The rampant short-termism is the real issue

Saudis don't fund half of Silicon Valley. Aramco is worth 2 trillion, apple alone is worth 3 trillion.

Saudis have built entire top-equipment universities out of nothing (KAUST), and hired top foreign professors, and offered generous scholarships to foreign students to fill it up.

You rant about short termism, but don't seem to like doing research yourself.

This is a discussion about VC specifically, Apple isn't relevant. The Saudis are large backers of many of the largest VC firms.