An Interesting Comment From a Google Ventures Partner
Via CNBC: "Google's Venture fund is planning to invest $1 billion in a wide-range of start-ups over the next five years, but the firm isn't necessarily looking for the next Facebook, Twitter or other media related business. ... 'There's a whole world of innovation out there outside of social media. It's a huge growth area, but we're investing a lot of money in life sciences,' said William Maris, Google Ventures managing partner. ... Maris said the fund seeks entrepreneurs that 'have a healthy disregard for the impossible' with forward-thinking ideas, especially in biotech. Maris said some of the areas he is interested in include businesses that are focused on radical life extension, cryogenics and nanotechnology. ... 'Part of my job is to discern the fine line between crazy and genius,' Maris said. 'We're looking for entrepreneurs that want to change the world for the better and that's important. So I do think our values are a little bit different than the typical sort of venture capitalist you might meet.'" This is just a comment, of course, and at present the fund isn't invested in anything that works directly towards the defeat of aging: one partner's views don't necessarily have anything to do with how the fund moves in aggregate. One of the real challenges in longevity science today is that there's little to effectively commercialize, even if you want to be really aggressive and pull results right out of research into an unregulated region of the world for development as a therapy. Things don't get interesting until SENS programs or similar start to deliver results that can be turned into an early product, or the tissue engineers and stem cell researchers make more of an inroad into reversing the changes in stem cell populations that occur with age. The leading edge of all this is still a few years away at the very earliest, and more like at least a decade for much of it, so far as I can see.