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Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. It wasn't pure research, but rather a culture of taking sufficient risks to get products to market through learning, discovery, iteration and execution. This approach would shape Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money).

The combination of venture capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. It provides private funds for untested and unproven technology and entrepreneurs. While most of these investments fail, the returns for the ones that win are so great they make up for the failures. Yet this system isn't perfect. From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory - income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models - seems like another planet. There didn't seem to be much in common between the scientific method and starting a company and this has been a barrier to commercializing the best of our science research.

Until today.